Updated on Saturday, January 17, 2009 at 10:53AM by stevem

On Friday 10th I got a call from 7 local news about the fish kill, we travelled to a property at the foot of the weir, where we found hundreds of dead and rotting Bass averaging 1-2 kg , along the banks and hundreds floating in the river. On Monday we joined a local commercial fisho who took us downstream from the bridge where he set his net and due to the abundance of the bass, we got 55 in the first 5 minutes. The fisho told us that it is illegal for him to net them, but he wants them out of the river as they will all die and cause a huge impact , and they will eat all of the juvenile fish stocks, he guestimated that their could be several tonnes of them, as he had been getting 200-400 kg hauls.

Click to read more ...

Updated on Sunday, January 14, 2007 at 10:10AM by stevem

Updated on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 at 12:35PM by stevem

A MARY River dam at Traveston Crossing would rip $70 million a year out of the Mary Valley regional economy, the Wide Bay Burnett Conservation Council claimed yesterday. Spokesperson Roger Currie said that if the State Government took a conservative 70,000 Megalitres of water from the Mary each year for consumption in Brisbane, the economic impact on the region would be substantial. “If that water’s going to Brisbane, then its use for agriculture, industry and consumption in this area is removed. “The opportunity loss from that water can be very conservatively estimated at $1000 a Megalitre. “That’s a $70 million hole in the regional economy and a $70 million benefit to the Brisbane economy from us,” he said.

Click to read more ...

Hello Peter, thank you very much for the invitation to your xmas Cabinet bash, unfortunately I have a prior engagement with the people of Traveston, I would have loved to have chin wag about the failings of the Bilateral Assessment Process for Paradise , I told Ian Campbell all about it last week in a letter

Click to read more ...

Wide Bay Burnett Conservation Council takes this opportunity to ask you to consider very closely the overwhelming weight of evidence, that the Qld government has not been capable of successfully mitigating the accepted significant impacts on MNES ( Neoceratodous forsterii and Elseya sp) in respect of the bilateral agreement assessment process, for Paradise Dam & Ned Churchward Weir on the Burnett River.

Click to read more ...

A spokesman for Ms Bligh says the project has this week been referred to the Federal Government for consideration under Commonwealth legislation. Roger Currie from the Wide Bay Burnett Conservation Council says it is important the process is made public. “There have been indications of that, based on Senator Joyce’s comments and also Senator [Ian] Campbell’s comments previously, that they would be a little bit reticent about allowing the Queensland Government to assess Traveston without having some sort of transparent, independent, public inquiry into just what really the impacts may be,” he said.

Click to read more ...

“Ah Minister, surely you understand that the purpose of the FOI ACT is to ensure that the Westminster system is accountable, and this Act guarantees that the people can gain the documentation we want them to have, what we don’t want, is for them to gain documentation we don’t want them to have, and the ACT has been specifically designed to ensure that we give them what they think they want, and we do this by deciding what is relevant and what is not relevant to their inquiries, its all very simple really , the only thing that the general populace don’t know is that the bureaucratic meaning of FOI is ‘FOR OUR INTERESTS ‘, the last thing we need Minister is for the riff raff to think that they should be involved in making very important decisions which could effect the lives of thousands of public servants, not to mention Ministers, Minister!

Click to read more ...

“The question is not whether environmental flows are important and should be protected, but rather, how, when, and where, and in what quantities should flows be reserved for environmental purposes in the state’s (Texas) rivers streams and in its bays and estuaries.” “The need for defensible science and acceptable answers relative to the state’s environmental flow programs is of paramount importance.”

Click to read more ...

 The Report of the World Commission on Dams

 
Dams and Development A New framework for Decision-Making Table of contents and downloadable files These online documents are Adobe Acrobat PDF files, and were produced from the designer's sources of the printed edition to produce acceptable output on desktop printers. File sizes are indicated (in kilobytes)

Updated on Saturday, September 23, 2006 at 10:35AM by stevem

Updated on Saturday, September 23, 2006 at 10:43AM by stevem

“The Water Resource (Mary Basin) plan 2005, has set environmental flow limits below those listed in the draft plan released for public comment in November last year”, said Roger Currie today , spokesperson for the Mary Basin Sustainable water resources consortium. This is an admission by the Qld government that it can’t meet its claim of 85% of mean annual flow (MAF) for medium and high flow objectives at the river mouth and have a strategic reserve of 150,000 mgl. These are the essential triggering flows for fisheries production.

Click to read more ...

The Mary River currently supports six species of freshwater turtle. Many of these are widespread in other drainages but two of the species, the Mary River Turtle (Elusor macrurus) and the Southern Snapping Turtle (Elseya albagula) are endemic to the region. Indeed, the Mary River Turtle is only found in this drainage, the Southern Snapping Turtle is also found in the Burnett and the Fitzroy drainages.

Click to read more ...