Bob Brown is ever the opportunist, even if his timing leaves a very bad taste in everyone’s mouths.
His recent pronouncement that our coal industry is to blame for the devastation caused by the floods in Queensland, NSW, Victoria and Tasmania is both absurd and insensitive.
All the experts, whatever their views on climate change, agree that the increased rainfalls are driven by the long-established cycles of La Nina weather events, just as El Nino is associated with drought.
No-one in the Coalition is suggesting that additional dams would have prevented the tragic Queensland floods.
The onset of the floods did, however, prompt a renewed resolve from the Coalition to ignore political correctness and to put dams back on the agenda as part of the national water management debate.
Dams are by no means the answer in every instance, but nor should they be automatically excluded purely because of politics.
If you consider Brisbane’s Wivenhoe Dam, built after the 1974 floods, there is consensus that it reduced the peak flood level of the 2011 disaster by about two metres.
ANU dam expert Jamie Pittock says that a “two metre higher flood level would have been much more damaging in terms of Brisbane directly, but also Ipswich.”
While NSW Dam Safety Committee executive engineer Paul Henreichs says the Brisbane floods would have been much worse than 1974 had the dam not been there.
“Without extra dams we are still going to get bigger floods and therefore I think people will suffer more,” he says.
This is no consolation and means little to the thousands of unfortunate Queenslanders affected by this disaster, but it does highlight the point that strategically placed dams have a vital role to play.
Despite the obvious, dams have not seriously been in the mix for two or three decades, largely due to the opposition and influence of green groups.
This was again highlighted when the Coalition recently announced our intention to develop a dam and water management plan over the next 12 months.
What we saw was a predictable negative, knee-jerk reaction from Bob Brown and Julia Gillard, before our work had even started. The fact the Gillard government is beholden to the Greens is a real problem, with base politics guiding its agenda, not common sense and prudence.
The political correctness which has shaped the water management debate in this country in recent decades was starkly illustrated in Victoria under the Brumby government.
At the peak of the drought, Brumby avoided dams like the plague and instead pursued monumentally expensive and impractical solutions such as the Wonthaggi desalination plant and the North South Pipeline.
Desalination plants also require enormous amounts of power to operate and should be an option of last resort, certainly not first choice.
The floods have reemphasised that Australia doesn’t have a problem with the amount of water we have, but with the management of it.
The Coalition opposed the Traveston Crossing Dam for a variety of reasons which have been well documented, and we absolutely stand by that decision. The Bligh government, to its credit, was at least prepared to seriously canvas the option of a new dam, albeit one of unacceptable design and location.
In the right locations, however, dams are not only effective forms of water storage for general consumption, for food production and for environmental flows, but can also play a part in low-emission power generation and of course flood mitigation.
Other soil conservation measures, including large-scale river levees and more localised landscaping projects also have a proven role in reducing flood flows.
In terms of the Coalition’s work, the consideration of appropriate dams will include looking at all areas of water management, including new technologies and innovations and consulting widely with the scientific and engineering communities, land owners as well land management and environmental groups.
The CSIRO, for example, has done some outstanding work looking at the potential in underground water storage, which could have widespread application.
While naturally occurring underground aquifers can’t hold anywhere near the volume of conventional dams, they are cheaper and can be located closer to the water user.
There is also exciting technology available in the areas of computer-aided river management, irrigation and flood control which we’ll be having a close look at. The Murrumbidgee River project comes to mind.
Utilising this type of technology, in conjunction with dams, enables the more efficient use of water within a system. If you have a stand of red gums that need flooding just once every four years from an environmental perspective, you can do it every four years, preserving water for other purposes.
While Julia Gillard and Bob Brown will no doubt attempt to whip up a scare campaign against our work, we will not be deterred. It is time to put political correctness aside and to overcome our dam phobia.
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