Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Traveston Crossing dam will be an eternal blight on the Mary Valley communities west of Ipswich and the environmentally precious Great Sandy Strait adjoining Fraser Island. It will flood valuable agricultural land, displace families and farmers, wreck existing infrastructure—road and rail—and potentially harm the Great Sandy Strait, risking endangered wildlife. The latest slight from the state government is its refusal to release the supplementary environmental impact statement into the dam to the wider public. It has been provided to state and local government agencies but not to anyone else—not to me, not to the public and not to organisations. This is outrageous.

The engineering foibles of the project are well known. It will be, on average, five metres deep and, as the Save the Mary River Coordinating Group has said in evidence to a Senate inquiry, it could experience evaporation of up to 1.4 metres per year. Because it is built on an alluvial flood plain, it could lose between 0.3 and three metres of water each year through seepage—what a dam! It might make a wonderful mud puddle but it is a woeful way to store water economically.

If the dam stats do not worry you, let me tell you about the downstream modelling done by the Environmental Protection Agency of Queensland. In recent weeks, the EPA let the cat out of the bag by confessing to the Gympie Regional Council in its sewage outflow regime it should allow for zero flows downstream of the dam on the Mary River. Zero flows in the Mary River would kill wildlife and damage the Great Sandy Strait. It would damage commercial fishing and recreational fishing—and the list goes on. The best that the state member for Hervey Bay, who ironically is the Queensland environment minister, could come up with was a panicked line that the admission was simply confusing and that the EPA had got it wrong.

The dam brings no benefit to impacted communities, which have already been trampled underfoot by the state Labor government. I call on the state government to give the people the right to read the supplementary EIS and to make their own submissions. I also call on Peter Garrett, as the federal Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, who has visited the dam site, to refuse any consideration of the case until this is done and the scheme is properly assessed.