Ms BADGER (Lyons) – Honourable Speaker, I rise tonight because it is time that this House had the discussion on the restoration of Lake Pedder. It would be globally celebrated and it has been internationally called for by bodies such as the IUCN. This is the time for Tasmania to do it.
Lake Pedder was controversially flooded in 1972 for the creation of a hydro storage lake, in what was a 10 square kilometre gem. In terms of being respected as a natural icon it was up there with Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef. Today, it is a 242 square kilometre impoundment, but it is still included in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area with the intent that when the dams reach the end of their life cycle, this magnificent icon would be restored. That time is now.
We know that those dams are built on an active fault line. Those dams are going to require a huge amount of expenditure in the coming years. It is very opaque, like most things in the budget and financials with this government. Exactly how much money is going to be spent on these dams? Exactly where is that money coming from? At the moment, we are looking at around $150 million for these two dams, Edgar and Scotts Peak, that are impounding Pedder. After we spend all this money on it, does it remove the risk that being on a fault line they could possibly fail? No, it just minimises the risk. Tasmanians are now aware of that risk thanks to an RCI that shows the flood mapping in Huonville and the potential damage that could be caused.
So they are partially informed to be able to make a decision about what they really want the future for this area to be and whether that is the best use of our money – propping up these dams without removing the risk – or whether we could, in fact, be restoring this magnificent landscape.
This is not a conversation about power. Pedder is a storage impoundment. It has a limited operating level of 1.53 metres. That is because it is in the World Heritage Area and it has that limited capacity to protect the aesthetic values. What about the aesthetic values of that original icon as well? That is 57 megawatts on average that it contributes to the Tasmanian grid. That is 57 megawatts for 242 square kilometres of land.
We are in a climate crisis. We need to have a proper discussion about how we are generating power capacity versus the land use, because there are other ways that we can help mitigate the climate crisis than just renewable energy. We also have to protect biodiversity. South-west Tasmania has some extraordinary endemic peat soils right there under the impoundment that could be sequestering carbon. When we are looking at other alternative power sources, since Cattle Hill and Granville Harbor came online on the grid, they generate 154 per cent more power than Pedder. I would just like to say they are two great wind farms that the Greens absolutely support, and we are going to see the transition as we have in other states.
We have just seen South Australia absolutely jump up the ranks for its renewable energy production thanks to the uptake of rooftop solar. We are going to see that happen here in Tasmania as well.
The restoration of Lake Pedder plays into the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, 2021-2030 – a decade to massively upscale restoration as part of building environmental resilience and protecting biodiversity. It is also part of the 30 by 30 challenge to protect 30 per cent of our land and seas by 2030. That was part of the COP15 pledge Australia made. That is now also recommendation 4 in Tasmania’s State of the Environment report: that we should look at our resource management and apply it to some of the pledges made at that COP.
The other main component of the restoration of Lake Pedder is the hope it brings so many young people – hope that we can admit and repair past environmental mistakes. There should be no second guessing: it is possible to restore Lake Pedder. We also have a duty to do so. With many young people suffering climate anxiety, here they have an achievable project. It is just lacking the political will.
There was an amazing group of young activists outside the Executive Building yesterday seeking a meeting with the Premier to discuss how they feel about it. It is extraordinary that a group of young people not old enough to have visited the original Lake Pedder feel so passionately about the possibilities it could bring for Tasmania, that they took the time out to advocate for its restoration. I hope the Premier sees fit to listen to these young people, to hear about the benefits they see it will bring not only for the climate but for job creation, to catapult Tasmania onto the national stage as an ecosystem restoration capital of the world.
If only the State of the Environment report had come out that little bit earlier, rather than several years late, because all of the recommendations in it could have been properly funded in this budget, or budgets before, so we could have properly invested in upscaling ecosystem restoration and proper climate mitigation measures, properly protecting biodiversity to help give those young people a better future. We do not have that, but what we do have is an incredibly mobile group of young activists filled with hope and optimism who are never going to give up on the prospect of environmental mistakes we can fix in this state. First and foremost is the restoration of Lake Pedder. It is time we started on it.
