Ballina Shire Council candidates against the idea of a new dam in Byron’s hinterland are accusing fellow candidate Sharon Cadwallader of false claims in her electoral campaign.
Ms Cadwallader is an incumbent member of the council and also represents the local government on the Rous County Council, responsible for town water supply on much of the Northern Rivers.
She’s the only woman running for Ballina mayor this year, alongside four other current serving councillors: Jeff Johnson, Keith Williams, Stephen McCarthy and Eoin Johnston.
The Greens aren’t running for the mayoral position but have a team of candidates in each of Ballina’s three wards.
Some have accused Cr Cadwallader of using the Dunoon Dam as a political wedge during the election campaign period, and if so, she has likely succeeded.
Ballina Shire Council candidates have taken firm positions either for or against a project already scrapped repeatedly by the Rous County Council.
‘Fearful’ and ‘shock terminology’ says Johnson of Cadwallader campaign
Crs McCarthy and Johnston say they support Cr Cadwallader’s call for an independent inquiry into the feasibility of a dam near the hinterland village of Dunoon.
But Crs Johnson and Williams and The Greens are against the idea and have relayed their frustration at what they say are false claims made about the Rous County Council Future Water Strategy 2060 in Cr Cadwallader’s campaign ads on television and social media.
The criticisms reflect concerns expressed in a letter to The Echo from outgoing independent Cr Sharon Parry, who declined to name the candidate she referred to.
‘The Greens and Labor will have you drinking toilet water and plundering our aquifer,’ says one of Cr Cadwallader’s election campaign ads, drawing immediate ire from Cr Johnson.
‘There’s no letting the truth get in the way of this emotive nonsense,’ Cr Johnson wrote in a statement to The Echo, while Greens’ Ballina Shire Council C Ward candidate Simon Chate described the language used as ‘fearful’ and ‘shock terminology’.
Cr Williams is RCC Chair and told The Echo ‘a number of the claims’ made in Cr Cadwallader’s campaign ads about water security were ‘patently false’.
Cadwallader says Rous indigenous heritage report not finished
Cr Williams also quoted Cr Cadwallader as telling attendees at a Ballina Chamber of Commerce mayoral candidates’ forum on Wednesday there was no documented indigenous heritage in the area of land that would have been used for the Dunoon Dam.
‘This is patently false,’ Cr Williams told The Echo on Thursday, ‘there is a 436 page indigenous heritage study on the Rous County Council website that is publicly available’.
Responding to the criticism, Cr Cadwallader said the report in question hadn’t been finished.
‘I’m not saying there’s nothing there,’ Cr Cadwallader said, ‘but finish the study’.
‘There is no cultural heritage registered in the dam’s footprint.’
Cadwallader’s campaign ‘recycled’ from QLD Nats campaign, says Williams
Cr Williams described Cr Cadwallader’s ‘toilet to tap’ campaign against recycled water as itself being recycled from a 2007 National Party campaign in Toowoomba, QLD.
Cr Cadwallader is running as an independent but is a former chair of the Nationals’ Women’s Council.
Cr Williams said the Ballina Shire Council had already invested $60 million towards upgrading wastewater treatment plants to be fit for purple pipes carrying recycled water.
The Rous Chair said all new housing estates in Cumbalum and Lennox Head had access to the purple pipes for toilet flushing and gardening but the water wasn’t for drinking or bathing.
Cr Williams lamented that only 13% of recycled water in the region was actually re-used while the rest was ‘flushed out to the river or the ocean’ and said he’d like to be elected onto the Rous County Council again if he won another term on the Ballina Shire Council.
Cr Cadwallader said she had voted in support of the purple pipe scheme 15 years ago and considered it ‘a good thing’, whereby the recycled water was charged at 20% less than other town water.
But she maintained she’d ‘said nothing that isn’t true’ in her campaign.
‘It’s sewage water and there is no legislation in NSW to allow it,’ Cr Cadwallader told The Echo on Thursday.
‘I don’t believe we need to be drinking toilet water when we have five times the state average rainfall here,’ she said.
Mr Chate for The Greens said the party supported the use of recycled water and listed places overseas that already did, aside from parts of Australia: California, Kuwait, Singapore, the United Kingdom and South Africa.
‘As The Greens, we’re standing right behind the Rous County Council 2060 water strategy, we want to honour that,’ Mr Chate said.
Greens candidate quotes misinformation in dam survey distribution
Mr Chate backed concerns raised by Cr Parry about a survey on the dam proposal handed out at a shopping centre in Alstonville.
‘People were feeling pressured to sign the thing,’ Mr Chate said, ‘there were campaigners going up to people in the plaza and saying “do you realise you’re going to be drinking toilet water?”’.
Mr Chate described a friend asking the survey distributors about potential impacts on rainforest in the Dunoon Dam potential footprint.
‘It’s “just privet”’, they said,’ Mr Chate relayed, ‘it’s not honouring reality really’.
Mr Chate said the site actually included 28 hectares of subtropical rainforest, six hectares of warm temperate forest, and that up to six per cent of ‘the last remaining Big Scrub would be affected or inundated’ if the dam was built.
‘And it would take out the Channon Gorge,’ Mr Chate said, before describing a potential ‘massive loss of koala life and platypus’.
The Greens member said the ‘Dunoon koala’ needed protection because its genus was more ‘outbred’ and therefore more robust than coastal koalas that were more inbred.
Byron residents ‘unaware’ of plans for groundwater extraction in Tyagarah, says Cadwallader
Mr Chate objected to Cr Cadwallader’s claims about Rous plans for bores on the Alstonville plateau.
The council candidate said while existing water use from basins below the plateau was unmetred, at least eight gigalitres per year was being used for farming and by Rous.
‘Rous wants to take out their bore to leave the shallow aquifer for farming and to drill a deeper hole into the Clarence Moreton basin,’ Mr Chate said.
‘The council would then take 1.2 gigalitres for Alstonville and Wollongbar if needed.’
But Cr Cadwallader said there was no data showing how much water was available beneath the plateau and that Alstonville wasn’t the only place Rous had in mind for groundwater extraction.
Rous planned to investigate the same option for Tyagarah in the Byron Shire.
‘A lot of people in Byron aren’t aware that’s going to be plundered as well,’ Cr Cadwallader said.
Cadwallader says party politics influenced Rous vote on dam
The independent mayoral candidate said the Dunoon Dam was axed for political reasons.
‘There are three Greens and two Labor members on Rous,’ Cr Cadwallader said, ‘they have the majority vote’.
‘Everybody supported the dam all the way through until the vote came in December 2020,’ she said.
‘I heard Darlene Cook say she was told at a Labor Party meeting that if she voted for the dam they would not support her at the local government and would campaign against her.
‘So they’re not doing this for the good of the community, it’s for their own political ambition.’
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