Labor MP, Susan Templeman’s Warragamba Dam Speech – May 09, 2019
“Heritage isn’t just a block of sandstone in Macquarie Street. In the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury, it is all around us and it is disappearing. The Aboriginal heritage that will be flooded if the Warragamba wall goes higher is part of who we all are, and deserves a strong voice to protect it”.
Source: Susan Templeman – Federal Member for Macquarie
Springwood candidates forum, April 15 2019
Templeman, “We know raising the wall has significant environmental impacts for the Blue Mountains that need proper consideration but have been totally ignored by the NSW government. Nor have we been given transparency around the other options and the main focus appears to be to justify increases in housing across the flood plains of the Hawkesbury Nepean”
Greens candidate, Kingsley Liu described the proposal to raise the dam wall as “reckless and ignorant”.
“We should not be building on Sydney’s best farmland, destroying our food bowl and the natural flood controls provided by wetlands, bush and farms”, he said.
Liberal candidate Sarah Richards was MIA.
Source: Blue Mountains Gazette
In May 2017, the NSW Government released the Hawkesbury-Nepean Valley Flood Risk Management Strategy – ‘Resilient Valley, Resilient Communities’.
In the report, WaterNSW concluded that:
“No other mitigation measures can achieve the same risk reduction as the Warragamba Dam Raising Proposal”.
Source: Warragamba Dam Raising – WaterNSW
Liu and Templeman are disconnected from reality
- Liu’s claim that there are “natural flood controls” is ridiculous. The Flood risk management strategy shows that the dam wall raising is the best option.
- Liu’s claim that “natural flood controls” can be provided by farms is silly.
- The Warragamba dam stretches into National park. Anyone’s guess where Liu sees the “wetlands, bush and farms“.
- This is 2019, when we are in the middle of a drought. Liu is talking about ‘flood controls’ in the middle of a drought.
- Templeman’s claim that “Nor have we been given transparency around the other options” is also false.
Templeman only won the seat with the help of the 8,870 votes flowing from Greens preferences:
| Candidate | Party | Votes |
| RICHARDS, Sarah | Liberal | 43,487 |
| TEMPLEMAN, Susan | Labor | 37,106 |
| LIU, Kingsley | Greens | 8,870 |
| PETTITT, Tony Bryan | UAP | 3,877 |
| KEIGHTLEY, Greg | Animal Justice Party | 3,611 |
Source: AEC Tally Room
If Sarah Richards had attended the forum, the readers of the Blue Mountains Gazette might have seen SOME challenge to the fiction from the ALP and Greens candidates.
For instance, if the dam wall is NOT raised:
- What will happen to insurance premiums of residents downstream?
- Who will pay for expensive desalinated water?
How many of those Labor, Greens and AJP voters live downstream from the dam? Don’t they care what will happen if the dam overflows?
The Leftist Guardian joins the ‘Porkie Party’ with this article:
‘So much that will be lost’: concerns grow over plan to raise Warragamba dam wall
Kazan Brown is a ‘Gundungurra woman’, a ‘traditional custodian of the land’. “What could be lost?” she says. “We’ve got burials, art sites. Ceremony sites, camp sites, you name it. It’s all there. It’s our culture – that’s what will be lost”.
Source: The Guardian
Here is a map of Heritage sites in Warragamba and Sydney:
- Did The Guardian make any attempt to check the claims of Kazan Brown?
- If there are Aboriginal heritage sites in the National park, why are they not listed on the heritage register?
You can’t govern a state of 7.5 million people (5 million living in Greater Sydney) when the official opposition simply ignores statutory information such as the Heritage register and makes up information on-the-fly.
“Brown’s daughter, Taylor Clarke is a university student who spends her free time with her mother on the campaign, Clarke just wrapped up six months working in the office of the former Greens NSW upper house MP Justin Field“.
There you go.
Clarke: “I think part of the problem is that we don’t know the full breadth of what will be lost. When the dam was made, a lot of people moved out of the area, and they took with them their knowledge and custodianship of these areas”.
The area is National park!
“Mum spent her whole life researching it and finding family members again, and neighbours to figure it all out again. If the dam wall goes ahead there is so much that will be lost that we don’t even know”.
In other words: Nothing
Clarke gets to the point:
Brown and Clarke say there are alternatives to raising the dam wall. A September 2018 report, from Jamie Pittock (ANU) recommends lowering the storage level of the dam instead – which would provide space for floodwater. Desalination plants and other water saving measures would then make up the shortfall.
Source: The Guardian
The point:
- The Greens are using ‘Aboriginal Heritage’ to block the dam wall raising
- Lowering the ‘storage level’ is a book entry. It means less water for Sydney – and Sydney’s population is increasing by 100,000 per annum.
- In other words, the Greens want us to build Desalination plants instead of dams:
- Desalinated water is 6-7 times the cost of dam water
- Desalination plants require lots of energy
- So-called “renewables” take up even more space than dams.
- Limiting water storage will also limit population growth…
- …but Labor wants to increase immigration
They found a bone:
Call for identification of mystery bone found in burial ground near Warragamba Dam
“The ABC has seen photos of the bone but has agreed not to publish them for cultural reasons”.
Ms Brown said ‘I have asked repeatedly for an update on the bones and nothing has been forthcoming’,
‘As far as we’re aware no one’s actually investigated what type of bones they are’.
‘They could be animal but there’s a high chance they’re [human] because of the location — we know of at least 14 burials on Big Flat’.
Archaeologist Wayne Brennan said … a forensic anthropologist or similar expert would need to go to the site to see the bone in situ to confirm its origin, and then if it was human the police would need to be called in to establish a crime scene.
The Warragamba Special Area is not open to the public and permission is needed to gain access.
Labor candidate for Wollondilly, Jo-Ann Davidson said Labor opposed the plan to raise the wall
Source: ABC News
