I MAR 2008
Minister repeats false claims of success on Burnett
Story: Arthur Gorrie
QUEENSLAND Water Infrastructure officials should be prosecuted, not protected, over their failures to meet environmental requirements attached to Commonwealth approval for the Paradise Dam, Save the Mary River Group secretary David Kreutz said yesterday.
Mr Kreutz said it was ridiculous a State Government that wanted to dam the Mary River should be in charge of auditing its past performance and should then appoint its dam construction company to conduct the audit.
“When you get audited by the Taxation Department, they don’t just ask you if everything’s OK and then let you check your own figures.
“That’s not what an audit is,” he said.
“The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act is still a law and the Paradise Dam’s so-called ‘partial compliance’ is not compliance, it is non-compliance in all but the best of circumstances.
“When you get a speeding ticket, do they ask you if you were speeding and then accept it if you say no?
“When you break the law, you get prosecuted.
“The same should go for government or neo-government officials who break laws like the EPBC Act,” he said.
Mr Kreutz said the Federal Government did not yet appear to have released the full environmental audit report on the Paradise Dam, a crucial part of any approval or rejection of the Traveston Crossing dam by Environment Minister Peter Garrett.
Even the one-page summary, which had been released, made it clear the Paradise Dam’s fishway was not working. Its success was a critical condition of the original Commonwealth approval for the Burnett River dam.
Water Minister Craig Wallace this week trumpeted the claimed environmental success of the dam, claiming it was “proving its critics wrong”.
Even with its fishway still inoperable, the Minister claimed the dam had been “unfairly attacked” in the worst drought on record and had “a good environmental record”.
“Paradise Dam is now making the critics drink their words,” he said.
“It is now well placed to fuel strong growth in the region by providing much needed water to farms and industry.”
He repeated his incorrect claim last week that the dam had been cleared by his department’s audit of its environmental performance.
“The dam is now at 45.6 per cent capacity,” he said, up from the 4 per cent he claimed last week, but still substantially less than the 57 per cent he said was the approximate minimum at which the fish-way would work.
And despite an audit summary that described the dam as “only partially compliant” and indicated the only organisation claiming this was good enough was the dam’s management body, Burnett Water Pty Ltd, a subsidiary of the State Government’s bulk water resource body, Sunwater, itself a division of Mr Wallace’s department.
He said he had been “advised by Sunwater that a recent Commonwealth Government audit of Paradise Dam had confirmed the dam is complying with the EPBC Act”. As reported in The Gympie Times last week, the audit report actually records the dam’s failure to achieve full compliance on the lungfish, specifically listed as vulnerable under the Act, and quotes the operating authority saying the fishway was an imperfect compromise.
stevem