One of the Liberal Party’s lines of attack against Kevin Rudd is to highlight his alleged role in the Queensland Labor Government’s decision, on its election in December 1989, to cancel the Wolffdene Dam which previous National Party and National-Liberal Coalition governments had intended to construct.
A particularly lurid example of this tactic can be found in Federal Liberal MP Greg Hunt’s forthcoming address to a Young Liberal Conference, excerpts of which are published in today’s Australian.
I am not normally in the habit of defending Kevin Rudd in particular or Labor politicians in general, but the mendacity and hypocrisy of Hunt’s attack, and others like it in recent times, bear pointing out.
The history, in brief, of the Wolffdene Dam issue and Rudd’s role in it is as follows. In 1971 Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s National-Liberal State Government decided that a new dam should be constructed in the Wolffdene area in the Gold Coast hinterland. However the same government subsequently rezoned the land which would have been flooded by the dam as “Rural Residential” and permitted further subdivision, property development, settlement and infrastructure in the area. In Queensland it is common knowledge that many of the beneficiaries of the rezoning and subsequent property dealings were Liberal and National Party supporters and cronies (known colloquially as the White Shoe Brigade).
In 1989 the thousands of residents who had settled in the area decided that they did not like the idea of having their homes and farms flooded, and launched a campaign against the dam. The then Labor Opposition went to the 1989 State election on a platform which included a promise not to construct the dam. It won the election with a landslide majority despite the electoral gerrymander (since abolished) which favoured the National Party, and promptly cancelled the dam.
Whilst Rudd was appointed Chief of Staff of the Premier’s Office by newly elected Labor Premier Wayne Goss, the policy had been adopted by Labor prior to Rudd’s appointment. The original initiative to oppose the dam came during 1989 from the then State Labor MPs Len Ardill and Henry Palaszcuk, and the main political sponsors of the decision to make opposition to the dam part of Labor’s 1989 election platform would have been Goss, the then ALP State Secretary Wayne Swan, and key State Labor frontbenchers Terry Mackenroth and Tom Burns. The final decision cancelling the dam was made by the elected Labor Cabinet, and there is no evidence to suggest that Rudd played a particularly influential role in this decision. More to the point, the voters of Queensland (and in particular south-east Queensland) had voted for Labor on a platform which included this commitment. Therefore Greg Hunt’s problem is not with Rudd, but with the people of Queensland.
Of course, Coalition politicians could plausibly argue that the Wolffdene Dam wasn’t the decisive issue in the 1989 Queensland State election. But they would do so at the risk of drawing attention to, and refreshing memories of, the issues which were decisive in that election, namely the institutionalised corruption and lack of accountability over which successive Coalition and National Party governments presided and from which they benefited.
In the intervening years the Queensland Coalition returned to power from February 1996 to July 1998. At that time they could have resurrected the Wolffdene Dam proposal, but did not do so. And at the last State election, the Coalition parties affirmed that as far as they were concerned the Wolffdene Dam was dead. None of this is mentioned by Greg Hunt or others (such as Malcolm Turnbull) who have tried to beat up Rudd’s role in stopping the Wolffdene Dam.
Then again, perhaps Greg Hunt doesn’t intend his little effort to be taken too seriously. It is part of a speech he is going to give to a Young Liberal Conference (never the most serious event on the political calendar), and it includes the claim that Rudd’s version of social democracy is informed by the ideas of people such as Verity Burgmann and Noam Chomsky. Verity Burgmann is a Melbourne academic whose political position can best be described as libertarian Marxism, whilst Noam Chomsky is an anarchist. Neither would be particularly flattered to learn that they were being ascribed authorship of Rudd’s brand of conservative social democracy.
I was firmly and comfortably planted in the middle of my large couch when I read that, and even then I nearly fell off. Of all the intellectually bankrupt things you can say… no wonder I’ve never heard of Greg Hunt. Actually… let me revise that. Of the intellectually bankrupt things you can say… I wonder why I’ve never heard of Greg Hunt. Howard should promote him… if he really does stand by his record.
Apart from anything else - the dam issue was in 1989! For Christs sake thats 18 years ago.
Anyone care to ask what the current Liberal front bench was up to in 1989?
They really are scared of Rudd and getting desparate.
I guess your “collective” defence of Kevin is indicative of what a hopeless state the left is in this country. Rudd is running a million miles from all of the positions regularly espoused by the writers on this site but you still defend him.
He is a devout Christian who would have been embarrassed by the undergraduate-level personal attacks on Tony Abbott yesterday on this site. He is trying to out-tough the Liberals on welfare and is basically sounding like Blair-lite.
I guess the problem that the writers on this site have is that poor old Kim Carr might be your candidate of choice, but unfortunately Khrushchev-era economic policies don’t win too many votes in marginal electorates.
To the contrary, some of us have been criticising Blair for his “New Labour” stance. As you can see by reading these posts on his “great moving right show”:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/index.php?s=great moving right show
That doesn’t mean that Kim Carr or Kruschev-era economic policies are our choice.
The stuff in Hunt’s piece about Chomsky is risible, and as Lindsay Tanner points out, his analysis is slanted either through stupidity or mendacity:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21004461-2702,00.html
Sorry that first link didn’t work.
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/12/28/the-great-moving-right-show-iii/
The other weird thing about all this, as Paul notes, is that Goss was the Premier and Labor had been elected not the Rudd party. It might be flattering to Rudd, but it surely overstates his importance in the scheme of things to claim the cancelling of the dam as “his” act.
From memory, it’s why the Labor Party won the seat of Albert that year too.
I’m inclined to think that anyone deliberately trying to change history for political purposes in such a blatant way deserves to be put in the slammer. It’s criminal!
It seems clear that the decision to abandon the dam was effectively made by the National/Liberal government when they changed the zoning to allow subdivision. This would have made the costs of resumption unrealistic.
I think it’s a stretch though, Paul, to say the beneficiaries were the white shoe brigade. More like farmers subdividing their land to realise maximum value on retirement. For the out-of-towners, Wolffdene is SW of Beenleigh, on the road to Tamborine. Beenleigh is about 40km south of Brisbane and Wolffdene is a further 27km. It’s due west of Ormeau, which is north of the Gold Coast.
The important thing is that the main road access is from the Beenleigh, not from the Gold coast. This map gives a rough idea where it is. It’s still countrified, just beyond the suburban sprawl.
It’s true though that the beneficiaries were most likely conservative voters.
As Kim Carr is a Victorian Labor Senator and I am a member of the Greens who lives in Brisbane, it’s a bit difficult for him to be my candidate of choice. Matt’s grasp of geography is as ropy as Greg Hunt’s grasp of comparative political ideologies.
My point in posting was only incidentally to defend Rudd and principally to expose the mendacity and hypocrisy of the contemporary Federal Coalition in trying to rewrite the history of a Queensland Coalition stuff-up for political advantage.
Finally, Brian is probably right about the white shoe brigade. My general point was that Queensland Coalition government land-use decisions generally tended to put developer and speculator interests (particularly those of developers and speculators friendly with the government) ahead of the public interest.
The bit I found scary from Greg Hunt was this:
Could someone please explain to Greg Hunt that it was the unsucessful National Party candidate for Toowoomba North during the last State election who lead the charge against the recycling of purified water for Toowoomba.
This would be the same National Party that is politically in bed with his ‘Liberal Democrats’ in this state. Furthermore the coalition in Queensland have never understood the idea of a watergrid linking the South East Queensland water infrastructure.
They’d be better off talking about the former chief of staff’s blatant attempt to rort the stamp duty act and capital gains tax. Our Mr Dudd back in the Goss era did not seem to know the difference between the family home and an investment property. Great credentials for a PM.
Also as chief of staff, what was his involvement in the Goss cabinet decision to shred the Heiner documents, knowing they were required for a court case and knowing they contained evidence of criminal paedophilia? Surely he won’t have us believe that Goss kept him in the dark and did not seek his input. Surely he won’t have us believe that he tried to talk the cabinet out of their decision to shred.
If he was a party to or knew of a criminal act committed by the Goss cabinet on Dudd’s watch, covered up and let go unpunished he has no place in public life in any capacity. Let’s ask him if and how he was involved and if he thinks it is just to have double standards under the rule of law.
I wonder the rainfall levels in the proposed Wolffdene Dam catchment area would have resulted in a viable dam. Surely this is the crux of any arguement about the merits of the decision to procede, or not, with the dam given the current water crisis in SE Qld.
Jane, if you go to the map, Wolffdene is quite close to the coast. On the rainfall averages map (click on Queensland) it seems to be in the same band as Brisbane, whereas the Wivenhoe catchment is further west and drier.
I’ve been watching the storms on satellite for a few years and there does seem to be a storm track through there. A few weeks ago Jimboomba next door had a cloudburst of 110mm in half an hour.
Also the northern end of Mt Tambourine seems to drain into that area and they have about 50% more rain than Brisbane.
Driving through, topographically it looks like quite a good place for a dam site, not an alluvial plain like Traveston. The catchment area is not all that large, but I suspect it would have been a handy addition to the network of dams if we’d built it.