Labor’s flawed analysis revelation demands Traveston Crossing dam inquiry
14th December, 2009
Federal Member for Wide Bay, Mr Warren Truss, has supported calls for an independent inquiry into the Queensland Government’s Traveston Crossing Dam debacle.Mr Truss said that it is now clear that the Queensland Labor Government spent between $260million and $865million on a project that never had approvals in place.
“The Bligh Labor Government must have known for at least many months that the environmental issues confronting the Traveston Crossing Dam were insurmountable,” Mr Truss said.
“Now there is new evidence that the State Labor Government used a fundamentally and flawed economic analysis to justify its choice of the Traveston Crossing Dam as the best option to provide additional water supply for Brisbane.”
A report by the Centre for International Economics commissioned by the Federal Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, to review the economic aspects of the Traveston Crossing Dam Environmental Impact Assessment documentation has concluded that the Traveston Crossing Dam was almost certainly not the cheapest or best option to meet South East Queensland’s water needs.
The report produced last month was a key document in influencing Environment Minister Peter Garrett’s decision to reject the Traveston Crossing Dam.
The CIE report concluded, ‘we believe the economic analysis is not sufficiently robust to support the findings that the Traveston Crossing Dam is the best option to meet SEQ water needs’. It said ‘ the economic analysis has been undertaken in a piecemeal way that does not bring together the findings in regards to the indirect economic, social and environmental impacts in a way that enables the systematic comparison of the Traveston Crossing Dam option against the alternatives’.
It says ‘the conclusions reached in the EIS in regards to the ranking of alternative options is heavily influenced by the assumptions adopted’ which ‘is likely to result in a high cost outcome for the community’. It said the assumptions adopted ‘are contentious and likely to bias results in favour of the Traveston Crossing Dam portfolio of options’.
“The CIE report says that the Queensland Government’s benefit cost analysis was ‘undertaken using a four percent real discount rate which is outside the normal range used throughout Australia in analysing infrastructure investments (typically between 6 to 8 percent real)’,” Mr Truss said.
“The CIE report concludes that the precise requirements of the Queensland Government that ‘88,000 megalitres of additional water supply be available by 2012’ created a distortion in the assessment compared with the second ranked option of desalination plants,” Mr Truss said.
“The Bligh Government’s assessment also did not take into account the fact that desalination plants would only need to operate when other existing storages were below optimal levels. Nor did the benefit cost analysis take into account the extra costs to the Traveston Crossing Dam of fulfilling the 1200 conditions imposed following the Coordinator General’s approval of the project.
“It is clear from reading the CIE assessment that Mr Garrett was not only provided with damming environmental evidence against the Traveston Crossing Dam but also clear evidence the Dam was economically not the best choice to meet South East Queensland’s water needs,” Mr Truss said.
“The Traveston Crossing Dam fiasco has uncovered fatal flaws in the methods used to undertake economic and environmental assessment of State Government sponsored projects.
“It is unacceptable for a State Government to undertake the planning, environmental and economic approvals for a project of which it is the proponent. Were it not for the requirements of the Australian Government’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, there would have been no independent assessment of all of the Queensland Government’s actions on the Traveston Crossing Dam at all.
“The Bligh Government must have known for many months (if not right back at the time of its original decision) that the Traveston Crossing Dam was not the best option to supply water to South East Queensland - economically, socially or environmentally.
“For three and a half years it sought to justify its decisions using documents and reports that were obviously flawed and which the Government must have known were prepared using artificial terms of reference and contrived methodologies,” Mr Truss said.
“There must be a full open Inquiry into the waste of hundreds of millions of dollars of Queensland taxpayers money and the unnecessary pain and suffering that has been inflicted upon the people of the Mary Valley for three and a half years”, Mr Truss said.
The report is available at
http://environment.gov.au/epbc/notices/assessments/2006/3150/pubs/traveston-dam-cie-report-part1.pdf
http://environment.gov.au/epbc/notices/assessments/2006/3150/pubs/traveston-dam-cie-report-part2.pdf
