The previous Council meeting saw Councillor McDonald asking Mayor Vic Pennisi about the mystery of the missing minutes of the Granite Belt Alliance.  Mayor Pennisi’s lack of any direct answer clearly frustrated Councillor McDonald, and the resulting exchange saw her voluntarily leave the meeting and the Mayor issue an order reprimanding Cr McDonald for inappropriate meeting conduct.  Why the evasiveness of the Mayor?  What was the background?  All very curious!!

The agenda for next week’s Council meeting provides a lot of answers.  The minutes from the Granite Belt Alliance meeting of 20 March 2023 are finally attached (see page 24 of the PDF), some two months after the meeting itself.  As Councillor McDonald and Councillor McNally noted at the last Council meeting, why did it take so long?

The rumblings can be seen in item 1 of the minutes:

The Mayor advised the meeting that he has received a request for a late agenda item and that he would let members decide if they were happy to deal with it at this meeting.

So the Mayor knew what was coming.  Whether or not the Mayor had time to pass on the late agenda item to members is not clear, but what is clear is that despite being aware of the late agenda item the Mayor did not pass it on to members until the meeting. 

In Item 3, Conflicts of Interest, the Mayor states that a complaint about his conflict of interest in relation to Emu Swamp Dam has been dismissed.  Curiouser and curiouser.  So the late item has something to do with Emu Swamp Dam?  What a surprise!

And lo, at item 9, we see the (unconflicted, apparently) Mayor table a proposed motion from the Stanthorpe and Granite Belt Chamber of Commerce.  Graham Parker read the motion as follows:

That the Granite Belt Alliance, as the peak body representing the Stanthorpe community groups for sport, agriculture, business, tourism, the arts and the environment, fully supports “the Granite Belt Irrigation project and Emu Swamp Dam” in the Regional Water Security Assessment. The Granite Belt Alliance recognises these projects as the only practical solution for the region that provides both Urban and Irrigation Water, that already has funding promised from the Federal and State Governments and customers, an EPBC & EIS approval for Dam site, CHMA and CHMP in place with First Nations people. It is the only solution that does not need any further assessment or approvals and can be implemented in the timeframe before the next drought cripples our community again when it runs out of water as we did in 2020 and 2021.

Where to start with such a mishmash of misleading statements.

• The promised funding from customers had already been terminated when Mr Parker made this statement, as he would have well known.  All customer contracts have been terminated and deposits refunded.

• The lack of further funds from the State government has been known since the release of the State government budget almost a year ago.

• Even when Mr Parker made the statement it was absolutely incorrect to say the project did not need further assessment or approvals, as GBIP never obtained the necessary planning approvals for the project and did not commence the Ministerial Infrastructure Designation Process that would have started the process of dealing with State and local government planning issues.

• How the project could be implemented in a short timeframe is beyond me, given that no company which tendered agreed to a design & construct model, so the project had no complying tenders and therefore no cost certainty. 

Since Mr Parker’s statement the project has only moved further away from being “shovel ready”.  The environmental EIS approval lapsed on 1 April 2023, a week after Mr Parker’s motion, and the already heavily conditional Federal funding disappeared in last week’s budget, which means that Emu Swamp Dam now has absolutely no funding at all.

So, why did the Chamber think it was necessary to ram through a motion, without following due process, in what is meant to be a cooperative community body?  To the extent that they want to express support for Emu Swamp Dam, the Regional Water Assessment process already allows for this in the public consultation phase, and any of the bodies on the Granite Belt Alliance could (after consulting with their members, of course!) choose to be involved during that consultation phase.

It's no doubt a waste of my time looking for any subtleties here.  It looks like just the same old bluster and spin on the part of the Chamber president and the Mayor.  When it comes to Emu Swamp Dam there always seems to be a complete failure of honesty and integrity from the promoters of this project.  And no matter how many times we say it, neither the Mayor nor Mr Parker has ever responded to the fact that the State Government modelling is very clear that Emu Swamp Dam would not provide urban water security for Stanthorpe in a repeat of the last drought.  IT WOULD HAVE BEEN EMPTY, just like Storm King Dam.

20 May 2023

[Full disclosure:  The writer is an ordinary member of the Granite Belt Sustainable Action Network, but is not on the GBSAN management committee and is not involved with the Granite Belt Alliance].