Ms BADGER (Lyons) – Honourable speaker, I rise this evening to speak about the magnitude 4 earthquake that happened at 6.30 a.m. this morning. I’ve got to be honest, when I was up this morning, I did think something very strange was happening and perhaps I was awfully tired. It turned out I was right. The room around me was tremoring.
On the radio, it was initially a bit of a novelty, of course, this isn’t something that happens every day in Tasmania as it does in Nepal or New Zealand or other places. It certainly wasn’t a laughing matter and it wasn’t something to be taken as a joke because it is quite serious. The location that this happened around the Pedder Impoundment, there are two major fault lines ‑ the Gell River Fault and the Edgar fault. And on the Edgar fault there are two dams in pounding Pedder – the Edgar Dam and the Scotts Peak Dam. We know from risk assessments and flood mapping, thanks to a Greens RTI, that if either of those dams failed, the catastrophic outcomes for Huonville – it’s just unfathomable how quickly the water would rise and how much of the Huon Valley would be underwater. We are not just talking about Huonville; we’re talking as far as Eggs and Bacon Bay that would actually be impacted. The number of properties that would be lost and the possible loss of lives is huge.
The dams weren’t fully assessed this morning when this news was coming through. It was really important that that was done first before the jovial reporting actually started to come in. Two of the dams were considered high risk because of their proximity to the fault line. They didn’t meet contemporary safety standards. We’re only just starting to get a full understanding of seismicity, not just here in Tasmania but across Australia. We now understand that Tasmania has in the past and will into the future experience earthquakes of up to magnitude 6 and 7. The one today, various figures were quoted, but about 4.4 magnitude.
The dams that are currently undergoing upgrading, Edgar is currently under works. Those works have started. Scotts Peak is still to come. Scotts Peak is significantly larger than Edgar dam, and it’s also going to be significantly more expensive. The cost for the Edgar upgrade started at $15 million. They’re now up to over $35 million. Scott’s Peak started at maximum $50 million. It’s now looking at $99 million.
Both of these dams are also in the Wilderness World Heritage area, so they had to be referred under the EPBC Act for these works to go ahead. When Edgar was referred, what happened to the Scotts Peak Dam? These are two projects, they’re part of the one project, so under EPBC legislation there should have been referred together and they weren’t. Why, honourable Speaker? Because everything relating to Scott’s Peak just suddenly disappeared from the government websites. Infrastructure pipeline, it had been there for years, gone. Of course, there was only one project that got referred, so it didn’t become a controlled action. Scott’s peak reappeared, of course, didn’t it, with the estimated budget doubling to $99 million from the $50 million that had originally started at.
Seriously, this government has to consider the costs of doing this because how long is it going to strengthen the dams for? It’s not going to foolproof them if there is an earthquake. They’re just going to fail slower.
There is a foolproof way and that is simply removing the dams. Now this is remembering that the Pedder Impoundment is an auxiliary storage impoundment. It produces 57 megawatts annually. It has done for the last 10 years. That’s it.
NW the Pedder Empowerment is actually included in the Wilderness World Heritage Area with the intent that it is one day restored to its original magnificent state. We are in a climate crisis. The science from around the world shows us that in the changing climate, as the icebergs melt, the Earth’s tectonic plates are moving, it’s going to induce more seismic, activity, honourable speaker, things are going to get worse. It’s going to become more frequent.
We’ve also got a solution. We restore nature. We stop destroying it. We talk about Lake Pedder and everyone thinks, ‘Oh it’s that great beautiful lake.’ Yes, it is, but there’s also a lot more to it. It’s incredibly important ecosystem. There’s a vast area of peat soil under that Impoundment that could actually be sequestering carbon and being positive for the environment. In the 2021 Australian State of the Environment Report – it came out under a Federal‑Liberal government – and what was the case study on ecosystem restoration, restoring Lake Pedder in Tasmania’s Wilderness World Heritage area.
There is a solution here. There’s something that we can do and it’s time that actually had this serious discussion about the cost of doing this versus investing in restoration in Tasmania because this would be a globally celebrated project and other people around the world, they’re taking down dams. They know the value. They know that these massive storage impoundments are not what it’s cracked up to be. It’s taking more water out of the natural landscape. There’s increased fire risk. The Americans calling call it ‘hanging their water out to dry.’ It’s time we had a serious discussion about this in this place and it’s time that we actually got on with restoring Lake Pedder.
