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As Mary Valley residents celebrated the end of the dam proposal, Mr Truss said the state government had wasted up to $865 million on an unapproved project backed by significantly flawed environmental advice and costings.

Mr Truss was referring to genuinely independent advice to Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett, which contradicted misinformation prepared for the Queensland Government by consultants falsely described as “independent,” even though they were paid by the government’s dam proponent, Queensland Water Infrastructure Pty Ltd.

Mr Garrett’s advisers found that the proposal, as presented to Canberra for environmental approval, was substantially flawed and based on highly questionable economic analysis.

MR Truss said the Bligh Government “must have known for at least many months that the environmental issues confronting the Traveston Crossing dam were insurmountable”.

“Now there is new evidence that the State Labor Government used a fundamentally flawed economic analysis to justify its choice of Traveston Crossing as the best option to provide additional water supply for Brisbane,” he said.

He said that a key document used by Mr Garrett in his assessment showed that the dam “was almost certainly not the cheapest or best option”.

The report, by the Centre for International Economics, commissioned by the federal Environment Department, described the Queensland Government’s economic analysis as “not sufficiently robust”.

The damning report says conclusions in the dam proposal’s Environmental Impact Statement were “heavily influenced by assumptions,” which it described as “contentious and likely to bias results in favour of the Traveston Crossing Dam”.

“The Bligh government’s assessment also did not take into account the fact that desalination plants would only have to operate when other existing storages were below optimum levels,” Mr Truss said.

“Nor did the benefit/cost analysis take into account the extra costs to the Traveston Crossing dam of fulfilling the 1200 conditions imposed (by the Queensland) Co-ordinator General.

“It is clear from the CIE assessment that Mr Garrett was not only provided with damning environmental evidence against the dam but also clear evidence the dam was economically not the best choice.

“The dam fiasco has uncovered fatal flaws in the methods used to undertake economic and environmental assessment of State Government sponsored projects.

“It is unacceptable for a State Government to undertake the planning, environmental and economic approvals for a project of which it is the proponent.

“Were it not for the requirements of the Australian Government’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, there would have been no independent assessment of all the Queensland Government’s actions on the dam at all.

“The Bligh Government must have known for many months, if not right back at the time of its original decision, that the dam was no the best option – economically, socially or environmentally.

“For three-and-a-half years it sought to justify its decisions using documents and reports that were obviously flawed and prepared using artificial terms of reference and contrived methodologies.

“There must be a full open inquiry into the waste of hundreds of millions of dollars of Queensland taxpayers money and the unnecessary pain and suffering that has been inflicted on the people of the Mary Valley.”

More than 1000 dam opponents celebrated victory at Kandanga on Saturday.

Source: http://www.gympietimes.com.au/story/2009/12/15/inquiry-call-on-dam-lies/