Carolyn Tucker

13 OCT 2006 

THE Premier has finally ‘fessed ­up and admitted what we knew all along: water prices are set to rise.

It will be up to that new body res­ponsible for delivering bad news, the Water Commission, to reveal by how much, and it’s likely to depend on the final bill for the Premier’s grand drought-proofing plan.

“If we are going to provide signif­icant infrastructure … there will be significant costs for water (and) no one should be under any illusions about that,” Peter Beattie told Parlia­ment on Wednesday.

“You don’t build dams for nothing, you don’t build pipelines for nothing.”

No kidding. Why wait until after the election to state the bleeding obvious?

The cost of the new infrastructure being proposed was always going to be borne by consumers whichever way the government tried to slice it.

What is not so obvious .is how water rates will be determined.

Will the Water Commission decide to impose a flat rate per kilolitre across the south-east or will costs involve more detailed calculations about infrastructure servicing specific areas?

Much of the detail of the Premier’s water vision is also blurry.

Will the state or councils or both initially foot the bill for the design and construction of various projects, and who will own and operate them?

However, the bottom line is perfect­ly clear: we, the consumers, will ulti­mately pay.

In some respects I have no objection to paying more for water.

It is a precious resource which will become increasingly scarce with the march of climate change and a price hike might encourage wasteful con­sumers to recognise its true value and treat it with due respect.

But I do have serious objections to paying considerably more for water when about $3 billion of the infrastructure costs will be soaked up by the wretched Traveston dam.

This week the list of reasons to scrap this dam disaster continued to grow.

If the astronomical social, eco­nomic and environment costs were not enough, we now discover it will pose a significant threat to life and property in communities down­stream.

With 2O years experience in disaster risk management, geographer Ken Granger be­lieves a major flood event involving the Traveston dam would dwarf the impact of the ‘74 floods in Brisbane.

One of the central planks of the government’s decision to chose the Traveston location was that the dam would mitigate the impact of flooding in Gympie.

Ken Granger says it will do exactly the opposite, sending greater volumes of water upstream at greater speed.

When I spoke to him earlier this week, Ken referred to Gympie’s golden history when it was once known as “the town that saved Queensland”.

“Perhaps in future it will be known as ‘the town destroyed by Brisbane’,” he mused.

Furthermore Ken said its shallow design provided ideal conditions for blue green algal blooms that would render the water toxic and unusable.

Even the last, and most important reason for its construction has been called into question.

Opponents have argued since the dam was announced it would do noth­ing to solve the water crisis in the south-east and Ken Granger agrees.

He believes the site selection demonstrates a fundamental failure to understand geography

In short, when Wivenhoe is dry, Traveston will be too. The people of Brisbane looking north to Trav­eston to quench their thirst during times of drought will be sorely disappointed.

The negatives for this dam continue to mount while the other side of the ledger remains completely bare.’I have not heard a single soul outside state government ranks suggest this dam should proceed.

Families have been being forced from their properties, businesses have been sunk, hopes and dreams have been destroyed, and for what? An extremely expensive white elephant, by all accounts.

The thought that ratepayers on the Coast along with the rest of the south-east are actually paying for this makes me feel downright queasy

The glaring problems with this dam were not enough to turn Queenslanders against this government but voters on the Sunshine Coast and in Gympie certainly made their feelings clear.

You have to wonder what it would take to convince the Premier and his team that this decision is simply wrong.

I think it’s fair to say that Peter Beattie has been known to change his mind in the past, so how about it Premier?

Let’s see some of that famous flex­ibility, a demonstration of your wll­lingness to listen to people, to respond to the electorate and to do what’s fundamentally right and reasonable?

I live in hope.