Damnation, Hunter Pays For Coast Neglect
Newcastle Herald
Friday November 17, 2006
WHEN we start new jobs and careers there are always milestones we remember. For me, the first bylined article I had published as a cadet journalist at The Herald was one of those milestones.
Funnily enough, that first article came back to my mind this week, courtesy of Premier Morris Iemma. Premier Iemma announced that the long-mothballed Tillegra Dam would be built, at a cost of more than $300 million, to "drought-proof" the Hunter and the Central Coast. As it happens, the first Herald article that ever bore my name was about this dam. It was 1984, and my article outlined how the Maitland Pastures Protection Board, the National Trust, the Save the Williams Valley Committee and the Dairy Farmers Co-operative were begging the government to stop the Hunter District Water Board from damming the valley.Critics said the dam would inundate thousands of hectares of one of the most fertile valleys in the state. The flooding would also cut off and make useless the surrounding higher country and wipe out travelling stock reserves.The National Trust protested at the loss of two heritage properties, Munni House and Underbank.Work on Tillegra was to begin in about 1994, but Hunter Water, under the stewardship of that remarkable bureaucrat, John Paterson, implemented a controversial user-pays system for the region's water users, drastically cutting consumption and eliminating the need for the dam.And that's where things sat, until the State Government, having allowed and overseen a long period of uncontrolled and poorly planned population growth on the Central Coast, suddenly woke up to the fact that angry voters in Gosford and Wyong didn't have enough water.It isn't surprising. They'd built their dams in the wrong places, allowed hectic commercial exploitation of aquifers and failed to plan for the population that sprawled out of Sydney.Meanwhile, the water-rich and relatively frugal Hunter Region watched complacently, secure in the knowledge that its own reserves were in remarkably good shape.Massive coalmines and careless agricultural practices had made a sad impact, of course, but the precious coastal sandbeds were still fairly safe and the vital forested catchment of the Barrington Tops had escaped the worst impacts of human depredation.Then somebody noticed there was a network of pipes linking the Hunter to the Central Coast, and the politicians suddenly had a relatively cheap way to placate the Coast's swinging voters. The pipes got upgraded and the water started going south in volume.Now Mr Iemma wants more of the same easy fix. The Hunter gets another dam to add to its collection of gigantic water features, losing in the process a little bit more of its precious heritage of fertile land and history. The pipe between the Hunter and the Coast gets upgraded again and the Government escapes the consequences of its lousy infrastructure planning at least until the next crisis.gray@theherald.com.au
© 2006 Newcastle Herald