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The stories of courage in the face of despair I heard from residents at Kandanga, Eumundi and Eudlo last week are the human face of a government that just does not get it.

The pig-headed insistence that the Traveston Crossing Dam will be built flies in the face of all logic and puts at risk some of south east Queensland’s prime natural assets and food-producing land.

Investment in a dam that will never work as an efficient source of water denies the real science of climate change, and ensures that our adaptation to that change has lost time when we can least afford it.

The underlying message from people who will lose their properties to this nonsense is that common sense will ultimately prevail.

They have no intention of accepting any voluntary offer from the government because they know in their hearts that the decision is flawed and must be changed.

Anna Bligh and her deputy Paul Lucas may trumpet the percentage of people who have sold and moved on, but that denies the existence of those who aren’t going anywhere.

It also denies history; the Wolfdene Dam was scrapped despite the state acquiring 80% of the properties needed to build it.

Putting a dam wall across a shallow valley at Traveston will block behind it the silt from the Conondale Ranges that has naturally built in every slow corner of the Mary River all the way to the sea to a height of 30 feet.

Farmer Les Hall has offered me a canoe and a shovel to test that truth but I believe him.

I also have no trouble with the logic that, if built, the dam will negatively impact both the world heritage-listed Great Sandy Strait Marine Park and the fishing grounds of Hervey Bay.

The federal government faces a real test on this issue. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has the right to block the dam on environmental grounds. The question is, will logic and common sense hold more sway than the dictates of Labor’s state political fortunes in Queensland?

The Traveston Crossing Dam is not a relevant water supply solution in an age of increasingly uncertain rainfall. The south east’s existing dams now rely on storm events for sustenance, our annual rainfall no longer enough to supply demand for water from a ballooning urban population.

Meanwhile water falls onto the roofs of homes and factories across the region and races off, untrapped, into turbid stormwater that pollutes our inshore water ways and river systems.

The concept of urban dams that capture, treat and re-use this resource seems to have an undeniable logic, but is a level of sustainability this government is oddly reluctant to embrace.

Is it that dams, as illogical and under-performing as they are, form part of a tangible asset base to sell off to some international private equity fund to allow our state government’s under-performing, inefficiency to continue unchecked?

Is this why the people of Eumundi and Eerwah Vale must suffer the intrusion of 275,000 volt power cables across their properties and why 73-year-old cattle farmer Clarry Gray is now facing the final decimation of a 100-acre farm – bought in 1962 – with its resumption for a 50 acre power substation.

Powerlines Action Group Eumundi co-ordinator Graham Smith calls the infrastructure over-the-top and the so-called community consultation process the box-ticking of a pre-determined outcome.

He is right to argue that in the face of the realities of climate change and our need to adapt, the destruction of people’s lives and livelihoods to transport electricity from coal-fired power stations is an obscenity.

Sustainable Business Alliance spokesman Justin Holbrook says sustainability means self-sufficiency. Associate professor Peter Waterman, arguably a world expert on climate change adaptation, says decentralisation of water and power supply is essential to surviving the future.

Both positions would deny the continuing consolidation of these assets by state governments quick to listen to the global monopolies forming to purchase control of them from anyone willing and foolish enough to sell.

The state’s projections for the ballooning cost of water from its own Bulk Water Authority over the next 10 years are frightening.

Is Anna Bligh’s insistence that the regional council approve subdivisions to house an additional 75,000 people in the short term fuelled by the need to build a customer base to go with the assets she may well on-sell?

Or is there another reason why, despite the community speaking with one clear voice about its desire to do things differently here, the state government continues to force outdated and clearly unsustainable solutions down our throats?

Source: Sunshine Coast Daily – Bill Hoffman (9 July 2008)