On a small-crop block outside Bundaberg, Deb Sorensen, a fourth-generation grower, calls it "waiting for a dam that keeps changing its mind." She farms alongside the Burnett River, on land whose irrigation allocation has depended on Paradise Dam since it was built in 2005 — and whose next decade of plantings has depended, since 2020, on a promise that the dam would be rebuilt to full height. That promise has been priced three times. In February 2021 the Palaszczuk Labor government committed to a $1.2 billion rebuild. By 2025 the incoming Crisafulli LNP government's own figures put the cost at $4.4 billion. Then, in May 2026, Sunwater's board — the state-owned corporation that runs the dam — voted to recommend abandoning the project, telling the government the cost had become "grossly disproportionate"; the chief executive resigned days later. The government said it would proceed anyway. For growers who planned a decade of plantings around water that was supposed to be flowing by now, the dam is no longer a piece of infrastructure. It is a political argument they cannot plant a crop around.
What the government did
Queensland elected a new government on 26 October 2024, when David Crisafulli's Liberal National Party ended nine years of Labor government under Annastacia Palaszczuk and her successor Steven Miles. Water security was a live issue in that campaign. The LNP's "Watertight" water security plan, released ahead of the election, promised new and augmented weirs across the Burnett and Thomson catchments — Cooranga Weir on the Boyne River, Barlil Weir on Barambah Creek, and works on the Thomson River — a rebuilt Paradise Dam, and a review of all 23 of the state's regional water plans to free up water the government describes as "unallocated." It also ruled out building new desalination or recycled-water plants, a position that sits awkwardly next to Seqwater's own planning, discussed below.
In office, the government has moved on several fronts. In August 2025 it declared the Paradise Dam rebuild a Coordinated Project, giving it a streamlined state approval process. Its 2026-27 Budget, handed down on 23 June 2026, allocated $694.2 million to the Local Government, Water and Volunteers portfolio, including funding for "capacity-restoring" upgrades to existing dams — starting with Lake MacDonald Dam and North Pine Dam — which the government argues can add storage equivalent to a new dam at a fraction of the cost. It has called for expressions of interest from irrigators to access unallocated water across seven water-plan areas, including the Burdekin and the Great Artesian Basin, and funded a 15% discount on irrigation water charges for 2025-26 and 2026-27 to offset a separate round of price rises working through the system, discussed below.
None of this started from a blank page. The Palaszczuk government had already committed, in February 2021, to a $1.2 billion rebuild of the Paradise Dam wall, after a 2019 engineering review found the original structure's concrete could not be relied upon in a major flood; the wall was physically lowered by 5.8 metres in 2020 for public safety. That same Labor government released the Queensland Water Strategy in October 2023, and Seqwater followed with its own 30-year South East Queensland Water Security Program, projecting that a business case for a new desalination plant would likely be needed by around 2035 as the region's population passes six million. The Crisafulli government inherited both the Paradise Dam problem and that 30-year planning document; what it has changed is the mix of solutions on the table.
The strongest case
A fast-growing, drought-exposed state has a genuine case for more storage
Put the government's case at its strongest, because parts of it are well supported by the record. Queensland's population grew by 2.3% in 2024-25 — the third-fastest rate of any state or territory — driven mostly by overseas and interstate migration, and South East Queensland alone is projected to pass six million residents within three decades. A state growing that quickly needs more secure water, not less, and the argument that the previous government spent its final years on plans and reviews rather than shovels in the ground has some basis: Rookwood Weir, the last major dam-scale project actually delivered, was not opened until November 2023, years after it was first proposed.
Capacity-restoring upgrades to existing dams are also reasonable on their own terms: adding storage to a structure like North Pine Dam avoids much of the land acquisition, environmental approval and catchment disruption a greenfield dam requires, while still adding water to the grid. And Bundaberg's irrigators have a legitimate grievance of their own: a functioning Paradise Dam underpins a regional agricultural and food-manufacturing economy worth an estimated $2 billion (approx.), and no party in this debate — Labor, LNP, or the growers themselves — disputes that the dam needs fixing. The disagreement is about how, and at what cost.
The evidence
The numbers behind that disagreement are unusually well documented, because Paradise Dam alone has now been through three public cost estimates, two safety interventions and a boardroom revolt.
Two threads run through the primary record. The first is engineering: an independent review in 2019 found that Paradise Dam's original wall, built in 2005 for roughly $260 million (approx.), had concrete defects that made it unsafe to hold at full capacity. The state lowered the wall by 5.8 metres in 2020, and by 2023 Sunwater's own investigations concluded the existing structure could not be repaired and would need replacing with a new wall built downstream. The estimated cost has grown by roughly $3.2 billion — from $1.2 billion in 2021 to $4.4 billion in 2025 — even though, as of February 2025, the detailed design was only around 15% complete. In May 2026 Sunwater's own board voted to recommend the project be abandoned; the Crisafulli government said it would proceed regardless.
The second thread is climate variability, the reason any of this matters beyond one dam. Wivenhoe Dam, the largest storage in the South East Queensland Water Grid, fell to around 39% of capacity during the 2019-2020 drought — its lowest level since the Millennium Drought two decades earlier. Barely five years later, in early 2025, North Queensland went the other way: Townsville recorded close to a year's worth of rain inside the first week of February alone, and the resulting floods cost the state economy an estimated $1.2 billion or more (approx.). By mid-2026, parts of eastern Queensland were back in below-average rainfall and elevated evaporative stress, with some storages at or below half capacity. That is the swing Queensland's water planners must manage — not a steady decline, but shocks in both directions, sometimes only a few years apart.
The long argument over new dams
Paradise Dam is not the only project caught in this argument. Queensland periodically revisits the Bradfield Scheme — a 1938 proposal to dam and divert North Queensland's wet-season rivers inland to water the state's dry interior — whenever drought bites hard enough to make the idea politically attractive again. The LNP, then in opposition, committed $20 million to a fresh feasibility study around the 2020 election. The resulting review, an expert panel led by economist Professor Ross Garnaut, spent roughly a year assessing a modernised version of the scheme and concluded, in a report the Palaszczuk government accepted and responded to in December 2022, that the scheme's costs "far exceed" its benefits — a finding echoed by a separate CSIRO desktop assessment, which found the scheme technically feasible but not economically viable. Both reviews recommended the state look at cheaper, more targeted ways to support regional development instead. That should have settled the question. It has not: Bradfield-style diversion remains a recurring talking point in regional Queensland politics whenever a drought, or an election, makes it useful again.
A quieter but more consequential version of the same tension plays out over who pays for water infrastructure, and who it is really built for. The Queensland Competition Authority's review of Sunwater and Seqwater irrigation pricing, finalised on 31 January 2025, found several rural schemes long assumed to be running at cost were not — in the Nogoa-Mackenzie scheme, for instance, Sunwater's proposed cost base rose from an inflation-adjusted $2.36 million to $3.6 million — meaning irrigators faced real price rises just as the government asked them to keep farming through the Paradise Dam saga. The government's response was a 15% rebate on irrigation charges for 2025-26 and 2026-27, funded by the state rather than by any change to the underlying cost of supply. Meanwhile in South East Queensland, the government's own 2023 planning flagged that a new desalination plant would likely be needed by around 2035 to keep pace with urban growth — the same technology the LNP ruled out in its election platform. Agricultural and urban water are managed as separate systems in Queensland, but they compete for the same rainfall, the same budget and, increasingly, the same political attention.
The critique
None of this makes new dams the wrong idea in principle. It does suggest Queensland's water planning has a rigour problem that predates this government, and that the Crisafulli government has not, so far, fixed. Paradise Dam's estimated cost has grown roughly 3.7-fold since 2021 while the design was still only 15% complete — a sign the 2021 figure was never a fully engineered estimate so much as a political placeholder, and that neither government was willing to say so before the number moved again. When the corporation responsible for building the dam recommends abandoning it, and the government's response is to proceed anyway without a fully costed alternative on the table, the decision has moved from engineering and cost-benefit analysis into politics — understandable, given the government's election commitment to Bundaberg growers, but a different kind of decision than the "detailed business case" language in the LNP's own Watertight policy promised.
The government inherited a broken dam. What it has not inherited — because a state government chooses this for itself — is a reason to keep committing billions to it after its own builder called the cost disproportionate.
A similar pattern shows up in the LNP's blanket rejection of desalination and recycled water. Ruling out two of the proven sources in the SEQ Water Grid before a review of the region's water needs was complete is a policy position, not an evidence-based one — and it sits awkwardly next to Seqwater's own 2023 modelling, which the government has not repudiated, showing a desalination plant will likely be needed within a decade regardless. Capacity-restoring upgrades to dams like North Pine are a genuinely useful, lower-cost tool, but they cannot substitute indefinitely for climate-independent supply in a region expected to add millions of residents while rainfall becomes less reliable; ruling out the two technologies built for that purpose narrows the government's options rather than widening them.
Queensland's own audit and pricing bodies have flagged the underlying weaknesses for years. The Queensland Audit Office's water reporting has repeatedly examined how water authorities manage financial sustainability and ageing infrastructure, and a 2016-17 audit found the control systems running the state's water network were not as secure as they should have been against cyberattack — a warning about the resilience of assets the state already owns, quite apart from the ones it is now arguing about building. Layering a $4.4 billion, contested megaproject and a periodically revived, twice-rejected diversion scheme on top of that record is not evidence of a state managing water risk methodically. It is evidence of a state managing water politically, project by project, drought by drought.
The risk to the future
A state that keeps choosing headlines over a plan
Queensland's water problem is not a shortage of ideas; it is a shortage of discipline in choosing between them. If the Paradise Dam rebuild proceeds against its own builder's advice, at a cost that has nearly quadrupled in five years while the design was one-sixth finished, the state risks locking several billion dollars into a project whose final bill nobody currently controls — money that will not then be available for cheaper, faster fixes such as capacity-restoring upgrades or unallocated-water schemes that could deliver secure water sooner. If Bradfield-style diversion is revived again the next time a drought bites, despite two independent reviews finding it uneconomic, the state risks repeating a nineteen-thirties proposal every election cycle instead of building the less dramatic, evidence-based mix of storage, recycling and desalination its own 2023 planning says it will actually need.
The people with the least room to absorb that uncertainty are the ones already living with it: Bundaberg irrigators planning seasons around a dam whose fate changes with each cost estimate, and South East Queensland households whose region is growing faster than governments of either party have been willing to build for. A water strategy that survives changes of government, drought cycles and cost blowouts is possible — Queensland wrote one in 2023. Whether either major party is prepared to follow it, rather than override it with the next politically convenient dam, is the test still ahead.