The Greens have welcomed a South Australian Government decision to cancel any plans for a weir at Wellington on the lower Murray, saying the idea was always ill-conceived.
SA Premier Mike Rann says a $130 million weir to help protect Adelaide’s water supplies was only ever a remote possibility.
“There’s been a natural flow through the Murray mouth for the first time since 2002,” he told Parliament.
“These improved conditions mean that we will not need to build a weir in this term of government and probably never, even taking into account extreme worst-case scenario modelling.
“It was only over going to be a last-resort measure to protect the drinking water supplies of over one million South Australians and for that reason I make no apologies for undertaking the necessary preparations should the weir have had to have been built.”
Greens MP Mark Parnell says a weir would have killed the Lower Lakes region at the end of the Murray.
“What we now need to do is make sure that the new Murray-Darling plan has enough water for the Lower Lakes, for the environment, that we don’t need to go down the path of considering blocking Australia’s major river with a dam,” he said.
Professor Diane Bell from the River, Lakes and Coorong Action Group has been fighting the weir plan since it was first proposed in December 2006.
“It was clear it was going to be an ecological disaster for Lake Alexandrina and Lake Albert, the Coorong and the Murray mouth and I’m absolutely delighted that the State Government has understood the wisdom of our arguments,” she said.
