When the State government officially opens the Paradise Dam, on the Burnett River some 80kms southwest of Bundaberg, on September 1st, it will be just over a week out from a state election where water and water management have been major issues.

Last December, when Premier Peter Beattie officially named it Paradise Dam, it was widely held that it would be full by the end of the wet season. Perhaps it’s just as well he’d chosen the name “Paradise” over the major alternative “Boolgee”, an aboriginal word meaning “full”, as the dam, despite that earlier optimism, now holds a mere 15% of its capacity.

Delivered as a result of a major electoral commitment made during the 2001 elections, Paradise Dam is the physical embodiment of an electoral promise that didn’t hold water.

Assuming it eventually fills to its 300 000 megalitre capacity, the dam, the ninth largest in Queensland, will impound almost 30 square kilometers and a 45 kilometre length of the Burnett River and will join the more than 30 dams and weirs already on the river and its tributaries. While the Burnett’s catchment is considerable, its rainfall certainly isn’t. On its tributaries, the Cania and Wiruma Dams to the northwest are only 6% and 1% full, respectively, while the Bjelke-Petersen Dam in the South Burnett is at just 3%.

The dam was always a controversial project as it included some of the best breeding and spawning grounds for the Queensland Lungfish whose worldwide distribution is restricted to the Burnett and Mary Rivers in southeast Queensland.

World-renowned lungfish expert Professor Jean Joss of Macquarie University says that while adult lungfish live successfully in dams, they require “shallow, slow-flowing, densely-vegetated riffles as spawning and nursery habitat.” These features are characteristic of both the Burnett and Mary Rivers but it is precisely these features that are lost by permanent flooding resulting from the construction of a dam.

As well as the lungfish the Burnett is also home to an as yet unnamed species of Elseya turtle. Both turtle and lungfish are understood to be quite long-lived. One lungfish living in captivity in USA was taken there as an adult 80 years ago. Because of their long life span as well as both their lengthy breeding life and time taken to reach maturity, there is a well-founded anxiety that any drop in reproductive rates won’t be readily detected.

Despite all this, the state government has repeatedly claimed that “Paradise Dam has raised the bar for environmental construction of dams and land rehabilitation.” In fact Premier Beattie’s release on the occasion of the official naming went so far as to declare “Paradise Regained For The Environment With Dam Construction”.

Much faith is being place in a specially constructed fish elevator that, it is hoped, will facilitate upstream movement of fish which are lifted in a cage from a pool at the base of the wall up and into the dam itself. There is considerable doubt among scientists that the elevator will be effective, but even if it is, Prof Joss says it will “simply take lungfish from one non-breeding area to another”

But the project has come in for criticism for more than environmental reasons. It was never highly popular among irrigators and downstream communities, ranking only 29th out of 30 in original preference. One reason for the reluctance was the high price anticipated to be charged for the irrigation water.

The dam’s expected annual yield is 124,000 megalitres for agricultural use and another 20,000 megalitres for urban and industrial use. These yields together account for almost half the volume of the dam and when an environmental flow allocation is also factored in, it’s plain that the dam would need to hold a lot more water than it does at present if it is to fulfill them.

There is a delicate balancing act between setting a unit price for water that would recoup the cost of the dam plus the ongoing operational costs and setting one that irrigators are prepared to pay.

Too high and it will remain a white elephant, too low and it will require ongoing government subsidies.

Indeed this was the overriding factor in the view of a recent international study on dams by the WWF. It singled out Paradise Dam as one of six internationally that it considered to have failed to meet the criteria of the World Commission on Dams.

Its report was critical of the lack of transparency about stated economic benefits and concluded that “based on the available information there are serious concerns about the economic viability of the dam as much of it depends on the expansion of the sugar industry. However, the sugar industry has not been profitable and it is likely that producers will be unwilling to pay the high water prices that are needed to achieve full recovery of the dam’s costs. As a result, it is likely that the dam will require subsidies indefinitely.”

Ever on the lookout for good media opportunities, it’s significant that Premier Beattie won’t be performing the opening ceremony himself, despite the fact that he’s repeatedly staked his environmental credibility on Paradise Dam.

In Parliament, on June 6th, he claimed the fish elevator had been successfully operational for several months and a turtle hatchery established. His assertion that “at Paradise Dam we planted over 100,000 trees to replace those affected by inundation” has been seriously questioned by conservationists, wondering how the loss of 45 kilometres of diverse riparian vegetation can be so readily offset by fresh tree plantings.

Yet he’s apparently undeterred by any criticisms, including those of a growing number of international scientists, nor by the considerable and widespread groundswell of opposition to the Traveston dam proposal. In fact, he’s continued to hold Paradise aloft as a model for Traveston, an even more ambitious folly poised to flood more than twice the area, on the world’s only other lungfish river, the Mary.

All this will be weighing on the mind of outgoing State Development Minister Tom Barton as he performs the opening on September 1st.

As he looks out over the earthworks will he see a fractionally filled dam or a drowned river?
Will it cross his mind that the assessment that this dam “ has the potential to increase net wealth in the region by up to $800 million a year and create more than 7000 new jobs” may hold as little water as the dam itself?
As he ponders his last week in politics, will his enduring view of Paradise be as a feather in the cap or an albatross around the neck?.