Mary River saved

In simply brilliant news, Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett has canned the stupid dam on the Mary River that was planned by Queensland Premier Anna Bligh.

I have a great affinity with this river, given that as kids a mate and I always paddled down it from near Kenilworth to Gympie (and beyond) each Easter.

The dam was to be built at a location called Traveston Crossing, and had some serious envirnmental consequences that would have come about had it been built. A biggie was that it would have drowned an area frequented by the lungfish - an endangered species virtually unchanged for millions of years that populates just the Mary and Burnett Rivers (although it has also been artificially spread to a few other SEQ rivers). When paddling down the river we would often sail over the top of these monsters, and could clearly see them cruising just about the reed beds. We were young and didn't know anything about them back then - originally thinking they were really huge eels! Anna Bligh was hanging everything on being able to spend some $24M to build a fish ladder for them. Clearly Garrett called shenanigans on that piece of tripe.

The other big issue with the dam was that it would have been very wide and shallow, resulting in massive water losses to evaporation. There was a similar plan some 100 years ago for doing such a shallow dam on Lake Alexandria on the murray River that was also canned due to absurd evaporation that would have resulted, but it seems Ms Bligh hadn't heard of that. Who was it said "those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it"?

The big spin-off problem now though is that Anna Bligh has turned vicious, saying she will ramp up plans to plonk desalination plants all along the coast to make up the "shortfall". One of these sites is within the wallum heathlands near the Sunshine Coast Airport - lands that once were national park, then designated as future industrial zone, and that as a Maroochy Councillor I negotiated to have designated as Conservation.

It seems that Ms Bligh can't see past the "engineer's solution" (build something big and expensive). She needs to look instead at demand management. Rainwater tanks all over (the previous tank subsidy in Brisbane was an amazing success) for a start.