Pipe water from north: Beattie

Sean Parnell and Steve Lewis
February 19, 2007

QUEENSLAND has launched an 11th-hour bid to wrest control of John Howard’s $10 billion water package with an audacious plan to replenish the Murray-Darling river system by piping water from the far north.

Queensland Premier Peter Beattie called yesterday for nation-building projects that encourage inland development, not curtail it, in a move that places Canberra’s river takeover in fresh doubt.

In a plan partly inspired by work done in the 1930s by John Bradfield, the engineer who designed the Sydney Harbour and Brisbane’s Story bridges, Mr Beattie would divert an extra two million megalitres of water each year from northern Queensland and northern NSW into the Murray-Darling system.

The Prime Minister hopes to finalise his Murray-Darling package with the states on Friday, but The Australian has learnt that other states retain grave doubts over Mr Howard’s massive rivers scheme, which would see Canberra take over responsibility for the nation’s most precious water resource.

Some states remain unwilling to sign off on the plan ahead of Friday’s meeting, in what would represent a significant embarrassment for Mr Howard.

Adding to state concerns, Peter Costello yesterday ruled out additional funding for the $10billion plan - despite Victorian Premier Steve Bracks suggesting “billions” would be needed before he finalised a deal.

“The package has been allocated $10 billion. If this plan doesn’t go ahead, you would be lucky to get out of the states collectively a 20th of that,” the Treasurer told the Ten Network’s Meet the Press. “The states will save whatever they were planning to put in, which was a paltry amount anyway.”

Mr Beattie’s reform plan completely recasts the debate over the Murray-Darling scheme.

Mr Howard has included a $3billion structural adjustment package, which will be used to potentially buy out water entitlements and help farmers move to better-irrigated areas.

He is pledging $6 billion to improve irrigation channels and reduce water wastage. But defying calls for farmers to lose their water allocations, and for development to be restricted, Mr Beattie has resurrected two infrastructure plans that would divert two million megalitres of water a year to balance Australia’s network of rivers.

The most ambitious of the plans would be an update of the Bradfield Scheme, under which excess water would be diverted from the Tully, Herbert and Burdekin rivers in north Queensland, to the Thomson and Warrego rivers further south and over the Great Dividing Range. This would then flow hundreds of kilometres to the Darling River.

Mr Beattie said the plan would make available up to one million megalitres a year, not only to replenish the Murray-Darling but also to provide water to irrigate the blacksoil plains around Hughenden and allow the Galilee coal basin to be mined.

While the plan would be expensive - the last costings in the 1980s came in at $1.38 billion - Mr Beattie said the state would contribute and industry would provide a return on investment.

The cost would be offset by a reduction in the number of allocations being bought back from farmers downstream.

“If we want healthy rivers, and a healthy river system in Australia, then, yes, you’ve got to look at allocations, but you’ve got to look at supply too,” Mr Beattie said.

“What’s been missing before is a significant commonwealth investment. Now if they’re going to do this ($10 billion package), this would provide water for NSW, Victoria, South Australia, as well as for Queensland.”

Mr Beattie will discuss his “visionary approach” with state leaders in coming days, and write to Mr Howard detailing the plans before they meet on Friday.

The second plan being promoted by Mr Beattie and his Infrastructure Minister, Anna Bligh, involves the northern rivers area of NSW, which is already being examined by the commonwealth as a potential water source for southeast Queensland.

Ms Bligh said a weir could be constructed on the Mann River near Grafton, and water pumped 70km to the Mole River, passing through a hydroelectric power plant into the Dumaresq River.

This would provide 950,000 megalitres for the border rivers each year, flowing down to the Murray-Darling.

With Mr Howard facing an ambush of ideas at Friday’s meeting, federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd held his own water talks yesterday with Mr Beattie, and has planned meetings with other premiers.

 
Water from north plan hosed down

Matthew Warren and Asa Wahlquist

February 20, 2007

A SCHEME to bring millions of litres of water from northern Queensland to the Murray-Darling Basin was an expensive distraction to proposed national reform of the river system, water experts warned yesterday.

Queensland Premier Peter Beattie, who proposed the scheme, is sitting on a number of confidential reports into the proposal commissioned by state governments since the plan was first conceived in 1938.

Cost estimates by the South Australian Government price water from the scheme at about $6 a kilolitre, more than five times the price of urban water and up to 30times that being paid by most irrigators who would use most of the new water.

A report into the feasibility of the scheme conducted by a consortium of leading water engineers was commissioned by the Bjelke-Petersen government in 1983. The report’s findings have never been released.
Former head of the Murray Darling Basin Commission and water consultant Don Blackmore said the Beattie scheme would incur environmental costs to Queensland coastal communities and the rivers into which the water would be diverted.

Dr Blackmore said moving the water inland would mean extensive pumping through massive new pipes and channels, requiring significant energy and resulting in major evaporation losses.

“You are going to lose more than 50 per cent of the water you transfer to evaporation. Carting water through arid environments inevitably means you’re going to have extraordinarily high losses.”

Wentworth Group economist Mike Young said governments should focus on resolving their differences at the crucial meeting between Prime Minister John Howard and the Murray-Darling Basin premiers on Friday.
“It’s important when we get close to solving the governance problems not to get distracted by dreaming up alternative ways of making new water supplies,” Professor Young said.

Mr Beattie said yesterday he had never hidden the massive costs associated with the Bradfield scheme, or its modern equivalent, but believed it was worth consideration given the commonwealth now had money on the table.
He acknowledged concerns on evaporation, but said that was an issue for all major water storages. The scheme involved a million megalitres, and not all would be lost to evaporation.

Mr Beattie said Liberal senator Bill Heffernan had assured him the scheme would be assessed by a taskforce examining whether northern Australia could be opened up to more farming, and that it was up to NSW to push for consideration of the Mann River aspect by a commonwealth inquiry on the northern rivers.

“I’d like the agreement on Friday to include an evaluation of this,” he said.

But Water and Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull dismissed Mr Beattie’s proposals. “These ideas have been looked at in the past and have been found to be not feasible for economic or environmental reasons,” he said.

“Water has a low value-to-weight ratio and costs a lot to move around. That is why long- distance water transport schemes tend to be almost invariably uneconomic.”

But Mr Turnbull defended a proposal to move water from northern NSW to southeast Queensland, which he described as “a mere hop, skip and a jump compared with the distance Mr Beattie is talking about”.

WWF water spokesman Nick Heath said there were many lower-cost opportunities to provide water by using the resource more efficiently.