Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release  Thursday, 31 January 2013

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au
 

Not one drop?

Did the people of Lismore and Grafton remember the words of their local federal MP Janelle Saffin when the floodwaters of the Clarence River went above eight metres this week?

In 2010 Saffin grandstanded in Parliament against the idea of diverting the headwaters of the Clarence River over the range and into the Murray-Darling Basin to inject more water into the nation’s food bowl and generate hydroelectricity, vowing, “Not one drop will be taken out of the Clarence River.”

How did their fearless leader’s words resonate this week with the residents when they watched anxiously as the waters rose to lap over the tops of the levees?

Saffin, and all her fellow MPs who are brainwashed into either green fascism, or free markets, or both, want their fellow Australians to live like the superstitious ancients and bow to the weather “gods” or market “gods” and believe there is nothing we can do to take charge of our circumstances by building infrastructure to mitigate floods and droughts.

Thankfully, the living standard Australians do enjoy today is because political leaders of past generations did build infrastructure, such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme, to meet the nation’s needs.

In terms of the Clarence River, the CEC explained a potential diversion scheme in a 25 May 2009 release:

The scheme would divert the waters of the upper Clarence and Nymboida Rivers over the Great Dividing Range into the Dumaresq River, and on into the Macintyre, Barwon, and Darling Rivers, before flowing into the Murray River near Mildura, and on down to South Australia. Additionally, a nearby Macleay River project would divert water into the Gwydir River and on into the Barwon and Darling Rivers.

Emeritus Professor Lance Endersbee designed the Clarence Scheme as a pump storage scheme, which can take advantage of surplus off-peak electricity to pump water over the range and into storage dams, which will then produce hydroelectricity from an annual flow of water comparable to that of the Snowy Mountains diversion.

(Professor Endersbee was Dean of Engineering and Pro-Vice Chancellor of Monash University, at the end of a long career which included distinguished work on the Snowy Mountains Scheme, Tasmania’s hydro scheme, and hydroelectric schemes in Southeast Asia.)

He told a Citizens Electoral Council conference in 1997, “There is the catchment of the Clarence River and it is a wonderful little cup in there, and very steep country, high rainfall and one of the highest rainfall areas in Australia, and they get the summer rains down from the monsoons coming down and they get the winter rains as well.

“So there is a lot of rainfall there and it all flows out into the sea, and if you have been to Grafton, you know how wide the Clarence River is at Grafton. It’s a big river.

“So I have … designed a scheme for the diversion of the Clarence into the Darling. Now … there is a lot of algae in the Darling… This would flush all the algae out of the Darling.”

Most importantly, the Clarence River diversion would go a long way to saving the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia’s food bowl, which produces 40 per cent of the national agricultural output, and comprises 75 per cent of Australia’s irrigated land.

Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood called on the nation’s political leaders to act with foresight for the future. “We called to build the Clarence Scheme back in August 2001 when we released our book What Australia Must Do to Survive the Depression and then in February 2002 we published a Special Report, The Infrastructure Road to Recovery including the Clarence and Macleay projects. Nothing has been done and now we’re left with a bill for flood damage and an agricultural sector dying for lack of water. This inaction must stop now.”