Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about the very important issue of water, and in particular water resources and water policy in my home state of Queensland. These are issues that involve both the state government and the federal government and I strongly urge both governments to take a more rational approach than what has been happening. I start by noting the quite extraordinary action of the Beattie Labor government in Queensland in recent weeks in announcing, pretty much out of the blue, the plan for a brand new dam in the Mary River catchment in the south-east part of Queensland near Gympie. That dam will flood up to 900 properties in the Mary Valley. Much of that land is good quality agricultural land and much of that involves people in the dairy industry, who we all know have had a pretty rough go in recent times. Certainly, there are potential impacts on and downstream consequences to the dairy industry and the processing facilities in that area.

The extraordinary thing is that it is quite clear from the approach the Premier has taken, and certainly the statements he has made, that he has just announced this out of the blue. He has said: ‘We are going to investigate it over the next six weeks or so and go ahead with it. I can understand that those people who are going to have their properties resumed are upset but that is just the way it is. There is a serious water problem in south-east Queensland and this dam is going to be built.’ He has the political advantage, if you like, in that he has had The Nationals nagging away at him in Queensland for the last few months criticising him for dragging the chain on new water infrastructure, criticising him for not building another dam in the past and generally trying to suggest that the state government will not build dams.

Of course, the National Party is in a bit of difficulty there. Not surprisingly, the area the Premier has picked is in the middle of country that, while currently having an ex One Nation, now Independent, state MP, was previous to that National Party heartland. If it ever goes back to any party it will go back to The Nationals. So it is not likely to bother the state government that it is going to outrage people in an area that is basically National Party heartland.

The bigger concern I have, apart from the impact on those people, is firstly the clear prospect of significant environmental damage and a number of endangered species being put at significant risk by this going ahead. The initial indications are that this is going to be very expensive infrastructure—as dams always are. It is not necessarily in a particularly good location, covering a large area of fairly shallow base, which means a lot of evaporation that can counter any water flows into it.

At a time when we are recognising that dams in the south-east Queensland region are not the answer, that many of them are down to critical levels and lower, I find it extraordinary, frankly, that we think we can find the solution in building more dams and that somehow or other they will all fill up and it will all be fine. It is quite an extraordinarily short-sighted approach that is risking massive social dislocation in the Cooloola shire between Noosa and Gympie. It is also risking significant environmental consequences both in that region and downstream and potentially it also has significant consequences for the dairy industry in the region. All of that so that the Premier can look like he is being strong and decisive about water.

At the same time the Toowoomba City Council has been pressing and pleading for quite a long time for adequate resources to build a state-of-the-art water recycling plant that will treat waste water up to dialysis standard—not only to a drinkable standard but water so pure that you could pump it back through your body via a dialysis machine—and then put it back into the water storage plants in one of the nearby areas where they get their water from and putting it back through the normal water treatment system. According to the council, that is the best long-term option for meeting that region’s very severe water problems for the city and many of the shires surrounding it in an area that is also experiencing significant population growth, like pretty much all other parts of Queensland in the south-east corner.

Yet we have an indication from the federal government that they are not going to supply the money from the federal water fund unless there is a referendum and the people of Toowoomba vote in support of having this recycling treatment plant and putting water back into their drinking system. On one hand I support the principle of democracy and referendums and giving people more say over decisions, but you just have to wonder why it is that this one single infrastructure decision being made by a local council—and one which, in this case, has the support of the state government—is the one where there is insistence on a referendum before federal money will be provided. If we had a referendum on whether or not the dam should go ahead in Gympie I would be interested in whether it would pass. I suppose it would depend on whether you just had the people of the shire or the people of south-east Queensland or people of the whole state voting. You would possibly get a different result depending on how close people were to the site.

This shows the extraordinary disconnection and the lack of logical thinking and of courage on the part of governments when they refuse to take some of these difficult choices and let the situation development to such a crisis level. They then take what I suppose they would say is a courageous option—as the Beattie government is doing—to crash through or crash and say that they are going to build this whether we like it or not and they are not going to listen to anybody. That is the sort of state we have got to.

There are reports in the paper that even the cost of resuming the properties around Gympie for the dam could be as high as $1 billion. Even the Premier said that it would be a number of hundreds of millions of dollars, and that is before you even start construction. That is before you start counting the downstream economic and social costs to the community that has all of those people pulled out of it. That is before you start measuring the impact on some of the small towns that are still in that area, let alone on the bigger cities like Gympie and some of the industries that depend on the produce that comes out of the land that is going to be inundated. We would have massive costs—over $1 billion certainly.

Just think what could be done with water supplies in south-east Queensland if the state government put $1 billion into full-scale water recycling and water use reduction infrastructure and into just fixing up the pipes that are leaking huge amounts of water every day underneath cities like Brisbane. We have got this money to spend. To spend it on another dam, with all its social dislocation and environmental destruction and with the quite strong possibility that it will not solve the problem anyway, just so that they can look like something is being done, just so that any time someone mentions water the government can point and say, ‘We are building another dam,’ is just insane. It is the sort of crazy decision that can be made when political imperatives push governments left, right, centre and roundabout and they desperately grab at any straw to try to get them past the latest crisis.

It is the same sort of problem we saw in New South Wales. We had the ridiculous situation where the state government landed on the most expensive and most environmentally unsound approach of a desalination plant. The state minister, Mr Sartor, said that recycling was out of the question because the public would not wear it. To just back away from a solid, viable solution because you think that the public will not wear it is, frankly, political opportunism and shows a lack of courage at it worst. That is what we are seeing time and time again in too many of these areas where governments are too concerned about the short term and not worrying about the long term.

If the evidence actually stacked up that this proposed dam on the Mary River was financially, environmentally and socially the best way to go, then I would be prepared to say so because it is the same principle applying to what the Toowoomba City Council is trying to do. Clearly, people are apprehensive about the idea of their own sewage being recycled and pumped back into their water supply. Everybody has an instinctive aversion to that. But the fact is that many water catchments in Australia take treated effluent from other towns upstream. The water is treated or re-treated and then discharged into a river that flows down into another catchment. Then it is taken and re-treated once again for water provision in another area. The only difference here is that it is being put back into the same city’s initial catchment to be drawn again after much higher quality treatment than is received anywhere else Australia.

Toowoomba City Council’s endeavour, I think, is absolutely crucial. I very strongly hope that the referendum there passes. I am prepared to advocate for that policy, even though it may well be unpopular and certainly with some is unpopular. I have received correspondence from some of those people with whom it is unpopular because I have promoted this proposal in the past. But the fact is that there is so much more potential for the recycling of water in south-east Queensland, even in the Brisbane City Council area alone. There is some recycling being done. Some water is being recycled for use in industry and back through power stations and the like. That is all positive. It is mainly the psychological barrier and the lack of political courage that is stopping people from taking that extra step of recycling water for potable use.

There is no magic bullet to the water supply problems, but I think that the failure to go the extra step in that area is something that we must reverse. If we can do that, we will really make a significant dent in the water supply problems in south-east Queensland and indeed in many other parts of the country. Other people will show governments and people such as Minister Sartor the courage that they did not have and they will then be able to also go ahead with much more rational approaches to adopting recycling.

The fact is that there are significant amounts of money there. If we are going to be spending the massive amounts that will inevitably be involved in the construction of a dam, let us look at what uses that sort of money could and should be put to. I should emphasise that Queensland has made a commitment under the National Water Initiative to ensure that proposals for investment in new or refurbished water infrastructure are assessed as economically viable and ecologically sustainable prior to the investment occurring. A rushed six-week examination will make it utterly impossible to enable that commitment to be measured.

As for some of the specific environmental problems, I also emphasise that there are clearly potential problems with downstream consequences. If you put a significant dam in the Mary River catchment then there is a real potential problem of it negatively affecting the freshwater quality and quantity flowing down to the Great Sandy Strait, adjacent to the Fraser Island World Heritage area—part of which the state government has just declared a marine park. The potential consequences downstream for the environment, for fish breeding and for opportunities for the fishing industry and recreational fishers could be significant. That must be assessed and it should be assessed at a national level. This is where the federal government and the federal Minister for the Environment and Heritage, Senator Ian Campbell, should step in. He has made a lot of noise in recent times about his dislike of wind farms. He has made a lot of noise about his preparedness to step up for one orange-bellied parrot with regard to a wind farm in Victoria.

This is a dam that, potentially, is going to risk the water quality in the Great Sandy Strait and the Fraser Island World Heritage area. On top of that, the specific location is a prime habitat for the Australian lungfish. Three years ago the threatened species committee, which listed the Australian lungfish, wrote in their advice to the minister that close to 40 per cent of its core distribution was likely to be impounded once water infrastructure developments, which have since occurred, went ahead on the Burnett River. The risks to the extremely rare and biologically very significant Australian lungfish are indubitable if this dam goes ahead. In addition, the Mary River cod is already endangered. Its limited distribution and ongoing population decline suggest that it already faces the significant risk of extinction without a dam on the Mary River that it is named after.

I call on the environment minister to make clear to the Queensland government that he will not allow a quick and dirty rush job to get the dam construction started before the end of the year, as the state government is suggesting. I ask that he insist on a proper environmental assessment of the risks to the threatened species and to the World Heritage area downstream. The rest of us can ensure that the economic and social aspects of this are properly examined as well. I am very confident that if that happens it will not stack up. The government should then put its resources into sensible approaches, such as what the Toowoomba City Council is doing with the recycling of water.