Bob Katter

Mr Katter outlines how water and irrigation can create prosperity in inland Australia. Photos taken by Scott Radford Chisholm

Six heartbroken familys – their loved ones – murdered or murder suicides.  I don’t know Ewen Jones. He presided at a Cowboys dinner letting us know that he and old ‘so and so’ were “old school tie” buddys from a ‘Rah Rah’ (R. Union) school.

We commoners were gently reminded that we’d gone to R. League Schools.  At my school, Mt Carmel, ‘History’ and ‘Logic’ were compulsory.

Now, these comments are not “ad hominem” they are at the heartland of this debate.  Because the real question here is who do you follow? “John Crew Bradfield” and “Leo Hielscher”? Or do you follow Mr Anderson and the exponents Mr Anderson has put before us?

Dr J.C. Bradfield built the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Story Bridge in Bris, Sydney’s water supply, the Univ. of Qld, Sydney’s Underground Rail System (the latter winning, that year, the “World Prize for Engineering”).   

Sir Leo Hielscher who with Bjelke-Petersen gave Qld its Economic miracle: - Coal, Aluminium, Nickel, Tourism. Leo at 95 is still working to see “Bradfield” happen. I was with he and his engineer last month.   Qld. Premier Peter Beattie, PM Malcolm Fraser, Dep. PM Doug Anthony, PM Kevin Rudd all are on record backing Bradfield.   You can follow them or you can follow Mr Jones, Messer’s Lindsay and Lindsay and Townsville Enterprise. To be fair, Mr Jones in his proposal for weirs on the Upper Burdekin and the Flinders Rivers is ‘spot on’. With the two weeks in which I had the balance of power, I secured $28m for what will be the first of two weirs above Charters Towers and $185m for Thread Irrigation, Ballot Farms at Hughenden. This was 4 ½ years ago. Why no action?

Because Fed Govts. have spinelessly bowed to the anti development Qld Govt.

As a published historian I am entitled to observe that the current Qld Govt is easily the worst in Qld history thanks to its euthanasia, abortion and scorn for motherhood; we Qld’ers are now a ‘vanishing race’.

They’ve quadrupled the price of electricity and sold Qld Rail, eliminating the jobs - sacking 14,000 railwaymen, 2,300 electricity workers (following reregulation), and more recently 6,000 taxi drivers. They've committed us to a ‘Nero like’ Olympic games which cost China $29,000m (Qld’s annual budget is only $54,000m).  $7,000m on a Taj Mahal for themselves and Pleasure Domes along the Bris. River and 33km of tunnels. NQld’s got none.

Qld’s Govt gave all of the Flinders River Water allocations to two corporates, Stanbroke and AACo (foreign owned). The locals, we Nth Qld’ers, effectively got nothing. The Great Theodore Labor and B-Peterson Country Party Govts took the land off the rich and the corporates (built the sinews of industry) and “gave it to the people”. This Qld Govt does the opposite.

The Qld Govt. claims it pioneers exports. It does. It exports jobs in coal mining and power stations to solar factorys in China.  HIPCo - Hughenden's ballot irrig farm proposal extended to C-curry, Julia Ck, Richmond will put 100,000 residents into the Midwest, where only 9,000 people now live.

Before 'balloted farm' irrigation at Emerald, Griffith (NSW) and Mareeba each had a pop. under 1,000 people. With “owner occupier” “balloted” irrigation farms each town grew to a pop of over 20,000.

Mr Jones quite rightly criticises the ‘extraordinary’ proposal to “Raise B-kin Falls Dam” to create pump hydro electricity. It is the same proposal T’ville Enterprise put forward for their ‘shrunken’, ‘miniaturised’ Hells Gates proposal, costed at a prohibitive $5,400m.  Much worse still, the Raised B-kin Falls project takes water from the dry inland – in the driest continent on earth – in order to create electricity in the most ‘coal rich’ and ‘solar rich’ state on earth.

Raising B-kin Falls – unconscionably – wastes yet another half million megalitres to evaporation. It starves Bradfield (Hells Gates) and Urannah of water. Destroying both projects for forever.

“We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil” No we haven’t! Ms Qld Govt took it from us. An abortion of a govt, rotten with “gang” “green”.

Now let me be very specific. The Bjelke Peterson Govt. (under Leo Hielscher) and the Fraser Anthony Fed Govt. announced the building of Bradfield in 1982, commissioning the leading dam builders in Aust. history to produce the “Bradfield Consortium Report 1984”.

Bradfield Stage I was the Hells Gates Dam and the Grand Canal to irrigation at the “Uplands Desert” S.W. of Ch. Twrs and thence onto Hughenden’s midwest plains. It was costed (in now money) at $1,410m. Recent add-ons would cost it closer to $3,000m.

Production from Bradfield Stage I is delineated in the “Hells Gates Upper Burdekin Irrigation Scheme” (UBurIS) (McFarlane Consulting 2018). This heavily footnoted document quantifies the project’s annual prod. Figures:

• Ethanol (clean petrol & a feedstock for plastics) - $870m
• Sugar – $502m
• Electricity – $240m
• Biodiesel – $10m,
• Beef Production (from sorghum & pondfeed algae) - $1,380m
• Eucalyptus – as dressed timber - $1,200m.

          (as it is an algae project there’s ‘net zero emissions’)

It will earn for Australia from from just UBurIS (Hells Gates) –

Bradfield Stage I $4,200m every year forever.

Hells Gates built to a crest height of 400 metres (above sea level) facilitates the syphoning – not pumping – of water to T’ville.

• T’ville will now get the cheapest and most adequate water supply of any Australian city.
• Ingham, with the diversion of the Upper Herbert, will be protected from the “catastrophic double flood”.
• The Hughenden, Cloncurry, Winton, Longreach Circle’ taking the Bradfield water coming through this Break in the Great Divide will supplement the great but erratic waters of Australia’s 6th largest river - the Flinders. And will deliver over $12,000m every year for forever.
• It regenerates my homeland the Midwest – the “Plains of Promise”. They sadly are now the “Plains of Perish and Pain”. They’ve been degraded by nature;- “the dry” bares the ground and then “the wet” erodes it away. With the ever-growing 12m hectares of prickly acacia infestation and the 3m wild pigs – we now have advanced land degradation with widespread and spreading erosion.

Ballot Farms and Thread Irrigation arrests and reverses this downcycle. It will also provide a reward for those heroic Australians.

“Keeping the flame on a windswept plain”.

“That will keep them broke ‘til they go insane”.

 My wife’s (and my) 10 acres in Ch. Towers 50 years ago hadn’t a single tree on it, it had two eroding gullys, scattered tufts of wire grass and over 400 chinee bushes and rubber vines.  It now has thick knee high euracloa and buffel, the gullys are rocked. It runs 2 horses and 3 kangaroo who visit. It has over 1,000 native trees and 22 bird species, lawns and gardens.

This is what we can deliver to Inland Nth Qld. The protection of our creeks and rivers, their banks now lined by irrigated pasture. A restoration of nature – the Flinders and Mitchell grasslands.  And most important of all, the creation of a wonderland of freedom, opportunity and excitement for our grandkids and their great grandkids.