I used to go out every few years with my mother and grandmother and most of western Sydney to Milperra in the 1960s to look at the floods.
Milperra was mainly vegetable and dairy farms in those days.
Even then people were asking – why does anyone live here?
So, rather than banning development on a floodplain, what did our society decide to do? Bring in more development, more suburbs! Brilliant!
What did our society decide not to do in response to encouraging development on a floodplain? It decided not to build dams and flood mitigation structures.
Not just in southwestern Sydney, but up and down the whole east coast of Australia.
Every year this happens – one would think it had never happened before given the hysterical outbursts from politicians and most of the media.
It has. Often. It happened last year.
This maybe a 1,000 year flood, although I am not sure how anyone could have worked that out. This wide eyed, fake shock cry appears to me to be that of a desperate politician trying to find a way of escaping responsibility for the consequences of knowingly having failed to plan, or, more recklessly, having determined not to plan. A cynical attempt to appear genuinely surprised and concerned whilst knowing that the inevitable had happened – again.
It’s not that we do not know the consequences of our actions as a society. We see those consequences before us all the time. It is not that we cannot learn. Instead, it is clear that some refuse to learn. We have some political parties, such as the Greens, who oppose dam and flood mitigation construction as a matter of policy. We have politicians, such as some in the Liberal and Labor parties, who wish to appeal to inner city voters by opposing dam and flood mitigation construction in order to garner votes in marginal metropolitan seats. They care nought for the people who pay for their ambition. Worse, at the very time when they are opposing dams, they encourage development on floodplains in order to please their pals, the developers – and to further their ambition of increasing the number of voters in particular swinging seats both in the city and on the coast. Base, soulless ambition.
The only party which has advocated consistently for the construction of new dams is the Nationals.
How is it that we have Lismore and towns nearby in northern New South Wales which, right at this moment, with water all around, cannot provide fresh water to their citizens? Why are we allowing this volume of fresh clean water, which, if harnessed, could be so valuable in the inevitable drought to follow this flood, instead to become a raging torrent bringing destruction and, tragically, death, and, then, once it eases from its flow, becomes a fetid swamp bringing disease.
The costs in human and animal suffering, infrastructure, farmland, wildlife, the list goes on, is immense. What makes it so appalling is that, with good planning, both in terms of infrastructure, such as dams, and planning laws restricting development on floodplains, much of this horrendous waste and loss could have been at least mitigated, and, I suspect, in many cases, avoided altogether.
