The idea of building a massive dam in Queensland’s Burdekin rangelands has been revived and then scrapped, over and over again, for more than 80 years.
The site known as Hells Gates was first surveyed for a dam by the engineer John Bradfield in 1938. Bradfield, who built the Sydney Harbour Bridge, thought he could irrigate the Queensland interior and change the arid climate of central Australia (an idea that has been largely debunked by scientists) by diverting northern floodwaters to the west of the Great Dividing Range.
About two decades later, folks in the Whitsunday region, a few hundred kilometres south, started talking about the idea of damming Urannah Creek, on the slopes of the Eungella Range. Over the years, plans for the Urannah Dam have been formally studied and discarded at least 18 separate times.
“There’s a reason people haven’t built these dams before,” says Maryanne Slattery, a water researcher and former member of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority.
“They don’t stack up. They’ve never stacked up.”
But still the politicians come back, decade after decade, with promises of money and new feasibility studies. This week and last, the prime minister, Scott Morrison, and the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, announced a combined $5.9bn in federal funding to build the Hells Gates dam ($5.4bn) and Urannah dam ($500m).
The dam proposals have not been scrutinised by the government’s own National Water Grid advisory board; the Hells Gates plan does not have an environmental impact study (no study is even in development); nor does it have a detailed business case, which is due for completion after the federal election. The dam funding is contingent on the business case stacking up, Morrison said in his announcement. So it seems fair to ask why announce the funding now?
Decades of past failures on these projects have only served to embolden Morrison and Joyce’s pitch to be viewed as nation-building pioneers; sure of success where premiers and prime ministers have repeatedly failed for decades, and where questions about viability remain in dispute.
“Governments seem to operate on this understanding or assumption that Queenslanders respond to big, shiny things,” says Chris Salisbury, a political historian from the University of Queensland.
“That these projects so often are seen to be targeted at north Queensland isn’t an accident; that mentality or perception that regional parts of Queensland still needs to be pandered to.
“It’s no accident these are happening in seats that both parties are targeting.”
Salisbury says “pie-in-the-sky, pioneer thinking” should be treated with scepticism. “There’s still this undercurrent of nation-building, breaking the frontier, transforming it into something that it’s not, and not meant to be,” he says. “This long-cherished dream.”
Adani 2.0
The Hells Gates and Urannah dam announcements are pitched at constituents in a string of bellwether Queensland electorates – the same seats that shifted decisively to Morrison’s government in 2019, as debate about the Adani Carmichael coalmine raged in the region.
Labor’s review of its federal election loss in 2019 found that the party’s “ambiguous language on Adani, combined with some anti-coal rhetoric, devastated its support in the coalmining communities of regional Queensland”.
In the months before the election, Adani had launched an advertising campaign criticising the Queensland Labor government for stalling on the mine’s approvals.
On Wednesday, as he announced Hells Gates, Morrison name-checked Adani as his language seamlessly shifted from nation-builder to exponent of wedge politics.
“The sooner we can get the state government to approve building this dam, then we can get under way. And so that is the next key step. So when they tell us it’s approved, we can get moving,” Morrison said.
“It took a long time to get Adani under way and that was a strong case and that is transforming north Queensland.
“Now, the only thing that will stop it, I think, is if the Greens get in the ear of either the federal Labor party, which we’ve seen them do that before. Or they get in the ear of the state Labor government. But as far as the LNP is concerned, here in Queensland, we’re all for building this dam and many more.”
Labor’s response to Morrison’s attempt to turn dams into Adani 2.0 has been to dismiss the announcement as electioneering without substance.
So the Morrison Joyce govt didn’t get advice from their own chosen experts, let alone a business case, before announcing this multi-billion dollar commitment.
— Terri Butler MP (@terrimbutler) March 23, 2022
It’s just another Morrison photo-op.#auspol https://t.co/MLnd5v8NxH
The Queensland water minister, Glenn Butcher, says: “To put $5.4 billion on the table for a project that doesn’t even have a detailed business case together yet is a little bit embarrassing for the government.”
‘We can’t magic water’
The proponents of the Hells Gates and Urannah dams sing the praises of the projects. Hells Gate will, says Townsville Enterprise, potentially irrigate 50,000ha of the rangelands, allowing for the expansion of agriculture.
Bowen River Utilities says the Urannah Dam stacks up financially, and has overwhelming support from the Greater Whitsunday region.
“Urannah Dam will transform the region with water security and reliable energy and is strongly supported by both major political parties and all three levels of government,” says James Benjamin, the chief executive of Bowen River Utilities.
Documents submitted by the Urannah proponents to the federal government for environmental assessment show it has consulted major coalmine operators in the Bowen Basin about buying water from the scheme.
Despite this rosy sales pitch, concerns remain that the projects are uneconomic and would be environmentally damaging.
An analysis of the preliminary business case for the Urannah Dam, for instance, found the project could return as little as 26c for every dollar invested.
Hydrologists have long expressed doubts about the viability of damming Australia’s northern rivers, which they say have “limited natural storage capacity”. A 2008 study said there was “relatively little opportunity in many northern rivers to actively harvest water for on-farm storage”.
Willem Vervoort, the leading hydrologist at the University of Sydney, told Guardian Australia that northern Australian waterways were too variable to be effectively dammed.
“Climate change is going to make this dam case even worse, it’s going to make the climate more variable,” he says. “You’ll have bigger floods and longer dry periods.
“I don’t have any problem with society making a decision that irrigated agriculture is of importance and that it’s something to invest in, but as long as we realise there’s a trade off. If we do that, there will be an impact where we take the water from.
“We can’t magic water. If we take it from some place it’s not going to be somewhere else. That trade off must be considered.”
Environmental groups and experts have raised significant concerns about “disastrous environmental consequences” from Hells Gates, primarily the impact of expanded agriculture – and increased sediment and nutrient pollution – going into the Burdekin catchment, which runs out onto the Great Barrier Reef.
The Burdekin mayor, Lyn McLaughlin, has called for catchment-wide planning to assess impacts on water flows.
Enter Bob Katter
If the federal government’s dam funding blitz is designed to create an Adani-style wedge issue in north Queensland, the Coalition appears to be unexpectedly now dealing with the thin edge.
The political story to take hold this week has not been the government’s attempts to pressure Labor into backing its dam plans; instead, reporting has focused on two blokes in Akubras, arguing about the details.
Bob Katter has wanted to build the Hells Gates dam since he was first elected to the Queensland parliament, aged 29, in 1974.
The federal member for Kennedy in north Queensland says he could have “basked in the glory” of a lifelong political ambition, after Wednesday’s government announcement.
“But then I’d be a hypocritical liar,” Katter says.
He says the government’s plan is a “betrayal” of Bradfield’s vision because the dam won’t be built high enough to send the water to the west; that the $5.4bn investment would instead amount to creating only 70 new farms.
Maxine Newlands, a political scientist from James Cook University in Townsville, says Morrison’s announcement tapped into messages that Katter’s party uses effectively at state level, where it holds three seats in north Queensland. Things like the need to “cut green tape”, and that environmental regulation stops progress.
“You can tell there’s an election in the air,” Newlands says. “Some of it [appears to be] to designed get Bob’s support and to get his legacy.”
But on Thursday, Katter spoke at length to the Guardian about the original Bradfield vision. He read aloud from a letter, sent by former deputy prime minister Michael McCormack last year, that said the dam wall would be 395m high. Joyce has previously said the water should go west.
“It was a day of heartbreak for me after nearly 50 years of work on this,” Katter says. “The people of Australia have waited nearly 100 years to get this scheme and they’ve destroyed it.”
