Queensland water management: sold down the river

The regulation on charges was amended at the next available legislative opportunity to allow multiple licences to be rolled into one licence for the purpose of charging at the "discretion" of the Director-General.

The Director-General appears to have exercised this discretion for Cubbie in an average year now pays $3.70 a mL for the first 1000 mL of water harvested and gets the next 199,000 mL for free.

"We are not tied to any taxpayer funded infrastructure," Mr Grabbe said. "We pay a charge to cover the cost of administration of the licences."

Mr Grabbe denied any knowledge of the internal machinations of the department in relation to the safety of his dam walls or the level of his water charges. He must be taken at his word, although when Howard Hobbs issued invitations to a 1997 meeting of the Coalition Water Policy Committee, John Grabbe was listed as committee secretary and his close Dirranbandi associate Henry Crothers was the chairman.

Out in Dirranbandi and St George, National Party politicians have been thick on the ground recently capitalising on the opposition to the Condamine- Balonne Water Allocation Management Plan (WAMP).

Queensland is now more than three years behind schedule in delivering a cap on water diversions from its one third share of the Murray Darling basin and is facing increasingly strident demands from the Commonwealth and other States to deliver.

The much delayed Condamine-Balonne WAMP proposes holding the line, at best, at a mid-1999 level of development. The farmers are replaying a variant of "We'll all be rooned, said Hanrahan".

Chief spokesman for the farmers is John Grabbe, whose Balonne Community Advancement Committee media releases can run to five pages without one mention of Cubbie Station.

"None of us want to destroy the environment," Mr Grabbe said. "If the river is being destroyed, it is being destroyed because we are doing what we were told to do. We were given entitlements to do things and we are doing nothing but developing those entitlements - clause one is that we have to do certain works and clause two is that we have to beneficially use the water."

When interrupted on the basis that the farmers had been given the entitlements because they had asked for them and the government, perhaps unwisely in some cases, had given them, Mr Grabbe changed tack. The river was not degraded, he said, and the science underpinning the WAMP had been shown to be flawed.

Coming soon from Dirranbandi will be a flurry of scientific reports and social and economic impact assessments commissioned by the Balonne Community Advancement Committee. Natural Water Resources Minister Mr Rod Welford had better be ready.

Other scientists and environmentalists don't believe the river is so well off. A world listed wetland just over the border in NSW, which the Commonwealth government is charged with protecting under international treaties, is the current environmental flashpoint.