Rookwood Weir will unleash economic potential of north Queensland

THE Rookwood Weir is expected to create a ribbon of water stretching more than 60km across dusty Central Queensland plains, fuelling a predicted $1 billion boom in farm production and 2000 brand new jobs.

Barnaby Joyce at Victoria Park on the Fitzroy River in Rockhampton, near the site of the proposed Rookwood Weir. Picture: Adam Yip

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DAMS, reservoirs, weirs, even the more evocative “inland oceans’’ were far removed from Barnaby Joyce’s mind when he strode on to a stage in one of Australia’s most affluent electorates in inner Melbourne shortly after the 2010 election.

The then federal opposition spokesman on regional development, Joyce wasn’t sure what to say to this venerable crowd of moneyed men and women at the party gathering in Kooyong, where Conservative establishment roots reach back beyond the Menzies years.

His chief of staff, Queensland Senator Matt Canavan, recalls Joyce settled on a general theme of “nation-building’’ before fronting the microphone.

But Joyce, sensing interest building in the audience as he warmed to his subject, began giving free rein to his gift for theatre, injecting fervour into his tone as he fleshed out his vision.

Evoking the nation’s collective memory of the Snowy Mountains Scheme and letting his voice build to a crescendo, Joyce could have been channelling Churchill when he closed with this powerful declaration: “This country is going back to building dams!’’

The reaction, Canavan recalls, was explosive.

“Barnaby had to leave straight after that speech so he had to walk down the centre of the hall but people were surrounding him, getting out of their seats shaking his hand and slapping his back like he was some sort of national hero,’’ Canavan says.

“When we got to the car we both sort of looked at each other and said – ‘I think we might be on to something here’,” he says.

Seven years later, Canavan is on the banks of the Fitzroy River 66km southwest of Rockhampton with one of the legends of Australian agripolitics, Larry Acton, both men gazing at what they believe will soon be a physical manifestation of what Joyce, now Deputy Prime Minister, banged on about in that Melbourne hall all those years ago.

The proposed Rookwood Weir, with a bankroll of $130 million from the Federal Government expected to be soon matched by the State Government, will create a ribbon of water stretching more than 60km across dusty Central Queensland plains, fuelling a predicted $1 billion boom in farm production and 2000 brand new jobs.

“People have no idea what we can grow in this soil whenwe get hold of some water,’’ says Acton – the straight-talking former Agforce president – whose magnificent 1100ha property near the Fitzroy will be thrown into chaos if construction goes ahead.

Acton doesn’t mind (“provided I am reasonably compensated”) because he, like thousands of Queensland primary producers, has long been singing from Joyce’s hymn sheet.

“This state needs to build dams if it wants to grow food – simple as that,” Acton growls, as he bounces across his property on a farm buggy, loudly berating those Canberra-based nervous nellies who lost the political will to fire up the bulldozers and nation-build.

A suspension bridge over Hoover Dam, the concrete Goliath crossing the Colorado River’s Black Canyon. Picture: iStock

Dams are, unquestionably, back on the Queensland agenda after decades of being “feasibility studied’’ out of existence.

Today, there are more than a dozen serious proposals across the state, including mothballed projects such as Hells Gate on the Burdekin and the long-touted Urannah project northwest of Mackay.

Malcolm Turnbull’s Coalition is using dams to enhance its brand as the nation-building party, revitalising an idea going back before the birth of Christ when an innovative tribe around Jordan built a stone wall across a creek and used the stored water to raise crops.

Less than one year after Joyce’s rousing speech, the Dams and Water Management Task Force was established, headed by then opposition finance spokesman Andrew Robb who injected vitality into research that threw up 100 potential dam sites across Australia.

By 2014, dams were the focus of a dedicated ministerial taskforce headed by Joyce and including the newly minted LNP Senator, Canavan.

That work fed into two documents we don’t hear much about, but which are critical to Queensland’s future – the Agricultural Competitiveness White Paper and the Developing Northern Australia White Paper.

Both highlight water as the key to injecting juice into agriculture, unleashing the north’s potential and helping meet Asia’s insatiable desire for nutrition.

The Australian Greens, its genesis mythology centred on the legendary fight in the 1980s to stop the Franklin Dam in Tasmania, still prosecute well-informed arguments against dams, with official party policy insisting on “a permanent prohibition on new large-scale dams on Australian rivers’’.

But dams are, indubitably, an historically proven method of providing reliable irrigation and drinking water supplies.

A once-favoured option, desalination plants, (also not supported by the Greens) proved a financial disaster when a flurry of “desal’’ building flowered in the first decade of the century as dam levels dropped during the fierce drought.

Taxpayers shelled out an estimated $10 billion for plants in Adelaide, Sydney, the Gold Coast and Melbourne. And then it rained.

The plants, expensive to run, were mothballed as dams filled and a 2011 Productivity Commission report delivered a scathing assessment of the billions of dollars of sunk costs Australian taxpayers will cover in the decades to come.

Dams, to the environmental purist, may represent an ecological abomination, but to people fascinated by humanity’s endless capacity for creative contrivance, they hold a genuine aesthetic appeal.

Canavan, who has gazed out over the Hoover Dam – the concrete Goliath crossing the Colorado River’s Black Canyon – is not immune to their captivating glamour.

“It fascinates and humbles people to stand on a dam wall and witness the extraordinary human ingenuity that has gone into a structure capable of holding back so much energy.’’

Email Michael Madigan