I rise to support this motion moved by the member for Lindsay, who, like me, lives within a world heritage area. But that's probably all we have in common when it comes to the environment, because, while the clean-up projects she referred to are terrific, you can't claim to love the environment and ignore the thing that is having the single biggest impact on the environment in which we live. And of course that would be climate change.
Frankly, the Liberals at the federal level have shown little interest in protecting world heritage in my region over the last seven years. In fact at a state level they are actively bent on destroying the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, or a sizeable chunk of it. The New South Wales Liberal government is continuing its crusade to ride roughshod over the environmental approvals process around the raising of the Warragamba Dam wall. They now want this planned wall to be higher than they originally said—not 14 metres higher but 17 metres. The spin, of course, is to save Western Sydney from flooding, but the real reason is to increase urban development in the flood plain. In doing so, they will destroy the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area along the way.
The New South Wales government wants to put 134,000 more people onto already overcrowded flood plains, where people will still be exposed to the worst and most dangerous floods however high a wall is built. That's because raising the dam wall won't stop downstream flooding from other rivers and streams that feed into the flood plain. Anyone who has been in the Hawkesbury for several floods knows those facts.
The New South Wales government is deliberately subverting a fair and transparent environmental assessment process. New South Wales agencies, like New South Wales Parks and Wildlife, have reportedly despaired at the New South Wales government's plan not to review the environmental impact statement for the dam in the light of the bushfires. Remember those?—the biggest fires that we've ever had, where 80 per cent of World Heritage burned, with millions of animals killed.
Now a federal department has joined those state agencies in criticising the state government. The Department of Agriculture, Water and Environment said the draft EIS for the wall-raising project needed to account for the effects of fires on 25 threatened plant and animal species that are likely to face risk of inundation when the bigger dam fills. We've also learnt of the federal environment department's concerns about the way New South Wales is the assessing the impact of raising the dam wall on flora and fauna listed as nationally significant under federal environment law. It is good to see this federal agency coming out with concerns.
New South Wales is trying to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars to secure offset land for the damage the lifting of the wall would cause to the World Heritage area. They want the effects of potentially inundating more than 5,000 hectares of Blue Mountains World Heritage area to be treated as an indirect impact that would not require offsetting to counter the likely damage. Raising the wall and flooding the area doesn't just affect the environment, although the effects are absolutely profound; it also affects Indigenous culture heritage, and the assessment of those impacts have been appalling. Gundangara women like Aunty Sharon Brown describe the process as rushed and inadequate. In fact, anyone who has looked at the process has described it that way.
UNESCO is watching all of this, and the federal government must report to it on World Heritage impacts. What we don't want is for the greater Blue Mountains Area World Heritage listing to be threatened by this project. There are alternatives. You can invest in downstream flood mitigation and in flood-safe infrastructure—road, bridges and drains. You can limit the number of people in harm's way. But none of these will get serious examination when you have a New South Wales government hell-bent on raising a wall irrespective of the gains or the losses. And that's their problem: they're in the developer's pockets. Nothing will shift them, not even reason, science or the threat to the region's major tourist attraction.
The region I represent has forests, swamps and rivers of all sizes. For many people, the environment
