3 September

The Snowy Mountains Scheme was a dominant force in building post-war Australia, socially. It brought over 65,000 Europeans and their cultures here, which changed Australian life fundamentally. And the engineering was revolutionary. But there are some other facts about the Scheme worth noting. It wasn’t really an electricity generation scheme. It was one of Australia’s perpetual fantasy schemes of ‘turning water inland’. It took the entire flow of the Snowy and redirected it to the Murray-Darling basin. The electricty was a side-effect, to help divert that water. It didn’t work. The Murray-Darling basin is still a train wreck. Supply of water creates demand for water, just as supply of roads creates traffic. At the same time the amount of electricty produced by the scheme is tiny. Snowy 2.0 is shaping up to be a similar engineering white elephant.