I read with interest Philip Rudd’s 27 December 2023 letter about Rous County Council’s Future Water Strategy and was quite frankly bemused at what I see as potentially misleading the community.
As well as being a Councillor on Lismore Council for 17.5 years, I was a Councillor on Rous County Council (RCC) from 1991 to 1999, I am well-acquainted with these issues and am a keen observer of RCC’s activities since then. I find it hard to believe that any further studies need to be carried out in regard to consulting with the Widjabul Wia-bal people, as cultural heritage studies were commissioned in 2011 and 2013, which demonstrated that they are strongly opposed to a dam at Dunoon. So unless RCC is looking for consultants who might be more ‘open’ to the dam, which I suspect may be the case, this seems like a total waste of time and money as these studies always cost a lot. As pointed out in the Far North Coast Water Plan, dams always have significant impacts, both financial and environmental and, in the case of the dam at Dunoon, cultural impacts on Indigenous artefacts that predate settlement.
In 2013 RCC put on hold any further work on the Dunoon dam for a variety of reasons, including those mentioned above and following advice from international water management experts that the most effective strategies to augment our water supply are to pursue water efficiency, groundwater and reuse. As 15 to 20 per cent of water is being lost through leaks, clearly water efficiency needs to be a high priority. What has happened since then is the two significant floods in 2017 and 2022 and, rather than focusing on augmenting the water supply, some in the community seem to see the dam as important for flood mitigation. I understand that the majority of RCC councillors, who were elected to local government on the basis of building the dam, also are focused on flood mitigation.
I note that as well as adding desalination to the list of options, Philip Rudd says that one of the options RCC is currently investigating is purified recycled water. Given that the campaign to build the dam was driven by a deliberate and uninformed scare campaign against water reuse (toilet to tap) and that RCC rejected the planned water purification proposal at Perradenya, I’ll be interested to see how the current RCC councillors react to that. As the 2024 local government election is in September this year, there may well be a change in the composition of RCC. I guess it’s a case of wait and see, but please, no more wasteful studies.
