Peter Prineas from Darlington writes about the Apsley River dam concept.
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IT SEEMS that nothing will sway member for New England Barnaby Joyce from his idea of resurrecting the Apsley River dam near Walcha in northern NSW, a project discarded by the NSW Wran government in the 1980s.
Mr Joyce has renewed his call for the building of the Apsley dam ("Apsley dam project back on agenda", The Northern Daily Leader, Friday, November 28).
It does not seem to matter to Mr Joyce that the proposed dam would flood part of the Oxley Wild Rivers National Park and a World Heritage area, or that the diversion of Apsley water to the Murray-Darling Basin would be prohibitively expensive, or that the Apsley is a low-flowing and already stressed river that cannot provide significant volumes of additional water for agriculture.
Nor does he seem to care that the hydro-electric component of the Apsley scheme cannot generate power continuously due to the lack of water, the 1982 scheme relying on coal-fired power stations to pump water back up the hill for use again the next day (making nonsense of claims of "zero emissions" electricity).
Mr Joyce also seems unconcerned whether or not the water to be provided by a new dam has any economic use.
He just thinks we need more dams, stating in a media release on June 12, 2014: "... the nation, for no other reason than our population is growing, needs to build more water storages".
Silly ideas are usually recognised as such by others, but as chairman of Tony Abbott's water infrastructure ministerial group, Mr Joyce has been able to include the Apsley dam proposal in a list of 30 dams under consideration by the federal government.
The Apsley dam seems like a dead duck, but perhaps Mr Joyce has decided that as a local political ploy, it will fly.
