No government is going to spend a fortune building a dam to protect a handful of small communities, who probably wouldn't reciprocate by voting for them anyway.

Far better to simply stop building on flood plains.

I agree with Squeers. This rant WAS a hotch potch of bilge, especially the first half which was just a stringing together of all of the usual anti-green cliches.

A businessman says he has a lot of work at the moment. You quickly respond you need to hire some more people. The businessman says "It's not that simple. You have to be sure that the new people can do the job, you have to be sure that the work will continue. It is a very complicated process that only someone with expertise in this business can properly do."

Switch to we've had a big flood. The same businessman who just gave you a lecture on how considerable expertise is needed when hiring new staff blurts out, "We need to build more dams." The same logic on staff applies to building dams, but it is much more complicated to find a good place to build a dam. This concept escapes Barry York. Mr. York admits he has no expertise in hydrology or geoengineering. It follows then that Mr. York sees the problem as political only, rather than a combination of political, social, economic and engineering problems.

Shadow Minister start the hat eating. Nutty, crazy, kookie ideas like sewage treatment plants, drinking water treatment plants, National Parks, air pollution controls, building insulation and Environmental Impact Statements were once nutty, crazy, kookie greenie ideas. Then of course we tried them and they became mainstream and we forgot all about the "greenies" who were ahead of their time in suggesting those and many more ideas.

Not all greenie ideas are useful, but they certainly have a strong record to fall back on and their ideas at least deserve to be heard and debated with all the other ideas.

Individual, The "Howard wasted decade' ended, with Howard in total control of the House of Reps and the Senate, there was no opposition! Howard did what ever he wanted, he just didn't do infrastructure, period! One of the reasons he was so humiliated in the end, the worst defeat of any illiberal leader in history!

Bob Green was quoted in my local paper as having said “the Mining companies created global warming which has caused the Brisbane River to flood so they should pay for it.”

The man is off with the fairies.

Anybody who has spent a lifetime living near big rivers have seen at least two or three big floods in their lifetime and would have seen more if not for the building of local dams
Particularly with the big wet seasons we’ve had in Queensland over the decades.

With all this hysteria about global warming. It seems as though fear took hold of some sections of the community and politicians in Brisbane and they were so intent on conserving water that they may have failed to release enough water from the Wivenhoe Dam after the first heavy rains. They should have had faith in the rainy season when it came and took the water restrictions off and let the population use a lot of the water in the dam thus draining it to a low level so it could handle the next lot of rain when it came.

Fear of climate change may have made them hold on to the water perhaps?

Are the greens who do not wish to provide more water by building dams, also in support of increasing the population by opening the flood gates to illegal immigrants as is the ideology of Bob Brown and my own local green candidate. How do they propose to ensure water supply for the ever increasing populations