Bob Carr urges UNESCO to consider threat to Blue Mountains

The former NSW Premier has urged an urgent investigation into the Blue Mountains National Park.

Warragamba Dam. Picture: Gaye Gerard

Forrmer NSW premier Bob Carr has called on the UNESCO World Heritage Committee to launch an urgent investigation into the Blue Mountains National Park, saying the region’s environmental protection could be “disturbingly undermined” by the NSW govern­ment’s proposal to raise the level of the Warragamba Dam wall.

The World Heritage Committee, which launched its investi­gation into the Great Barrier Reef on Friday, says its main purpose in Australia is it to ascertain whether the reef “should be inscribed on the List of World Heritage in ­Danger”.

Mr Carr says their aims should go further. “Their agenda is huge,” he told The Australian, “but I am urging a delegation also be sent to the Blue Mountains to look at environmental threats we are facing with the dam and in the aftermath of the mega bushfires of 2019-20.”

The project has been widely denounced by traditional landowners and a clutch of environmental agencies, who say raising the dam level will likely damage sites of cultural significance, as well as natural habitats within the areas surrounding the dam.

The Berejiklian government insists the project to raise the Warragamba Dam wall by 14m will mitigate potential flooding in western Sydney — such as that experienced in March — and reduce the risk to “life, property and community assets”.

In early July, the Australian Archaeological Association claimed the government’s proposal to raise the wall was too narrow and “failed to take into account intangible heritage” that could be lost if the project proceeded.

Mr Carr said the plan to raise the dam wall was “a shoddy bit of work” from start to finish, fuelled by self-interest and a barefaced disregard for one of the country’s most precious “pieces of wilderness … We know that 50 per cent of the flooding in the area comes from different rivers. Even the Insurance Council of Australia is advising against it, which should tell us a lot.”

It was essential, Mr Carr said, that the government did not kowtow to housing developers who wished to use the western Sydney plain for their commercial gain and interest.

In a letter to World Heritage Centre director Mechtild Rossler, the former foreign minister said it was deeply disturbing that the environmental protections established by his government for the Blue Mountains had been undermined through the proposed raising of the dam wall.

“The draft decision proposed by the World Heritage Secretariat does not recognise the urgency of threats facing the region,” wrote Mr Carr, adding that a monitoring mission should be sent to the Greater Blue Mountains as a matter of urgency.

With the NSW government poised to begin construction on the dam within the next year, Mr Carr said a raised wall would inundate more than 6000ha of World Heritage, including some of the few areas not fire-affected.

For Mr Carr, the project is personal. “My special concern stems from my time as premier of NSW, at which time I oversaw the inscription of the Blue Mountains on the World Heritage List in 2000 and the passing of legislation ­prohibiting the enlargement of dams within the Greater Blue Mountains,” he said.

“What we have in the Greater Blue Mountains is a very special and unique piece of wilderness … an almost religious sense of what our country was like pre-1788.”

Mr Carr told The Australian he hoped his intervention would moti­vate the World Heritage Centre to consider the environmental threats facing the Blue Mountains, alongside its investigation into the Great Barrier Reef.