Wellington weir could solve SA’s Murray River water issues: Senator David Leyonhjelm
A CONTROVERSIAL weir at Wellington would ease South Australia’s water woes, the chair of a Murray Darling inquiry says.
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A CONTROVERSIAL weir at Wellington would ease South Australia’s water woes, the chair of a Murray Darling inquiry says.
NSW Senator David Leyonhjelm said the Murray Darling Basin Plan inquiry heard a weir could save billions of litres of water.
Critics including the State Government say a weir would destroy the ecology of the Lower Lakes and threaten endangered species.
During the last drought, the weir was a serious option. Up to 2010, the State Government spent more than $14 million exploring the idea including build roads to the proposed site on Pomanda Island.
The idea was to separate the River Murray from the Lower Lakes, building up the stocks of fresh water for drinking supplies, returning the lakes to their naturally saline state and stopping hundreds of billions of litres of Murray water from evaporating.
Senator Leyonhjelm said that SA did not need the extra 450 billion litres that is at the centre of a political furore, that a weir would solve the problem, and that upstream states were seeing schools close, jobs disappear, and people going broke.
“SA has not suffered any of that pain,” he said.
“This paranoia, this idea that water has to come down the river in vast quantities for SA’s benefit is just not based in reality.”
Under the Murray Darling Basin Plan 2750 billion litres of water a year should be saved, and the Government promises it will also deliver an optional extra 450 billion litres, although how that will happen is not clear.
National Irrigators’ Council chief executive Tom Chesson said in the case of a “rip-roaring drought” authorities would have to investigate the weir option.
“We’re going to have droughts again and the Basin Plan is not developed for droughts,” he said.
“We’ll run out of water again. That would be when something like the Wellington Weir would obviously be investigated.”
However, Mr Chesson says a more important solution lay with smarter, more modern infrastructure.
“We can’t be relying on 1890s technology, built in the 1940s when Hitler was marching across Europe, Sydney was being shot at by Japanese submarines, and polio was destroying the next generation,” he said.
Australian Conservation Foundation spokesman Jonathan La Nauze said Senator Leyonhjelm’s suggestion was short-sighted and cynical.
“It’s a cynical move by someone who would quite happily see not a drop flow across the border to SA,” he said.
“It’s a proposal from someone upstream who feels no obligation to look after those downstream of him and the wellbeing of the river that we all depend on.
On Wednesday SA Labor Senator Penny Wong attacked Senator Nick Xenophon, who withheld a crucial vote until the Government convinced him the water savings would be delivered, for capitulating. “Not a single drop” would be delivered, she said.