“Let’s implement the Bradfield Scheme” is the call, most recently by Pauline Hanson this week, but also occasionally by Bob Katter and others.

Named in 1938 for Queensland-born civil engineer Dr John Bradfield (1867–1943) who designed the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Brisbane's Story Bridge, the Bradfield Scheme proposed massively increased inland water storage and irrigation through southwest Queensland and northern South Australia.

To achieve this, a series of pipes and dams would redirect tropical rainfall from the east of the Great Dividing Range to storages in the west.

Bradfield suggested damming the headwaters of the Tully, Herbert and Burdekin rivers in North Queensland linking the reservoirs with tunnels and then diverting it across the Great Dividing Range possibly into the Lake Eyre Basin at the Thomson River or into the Flinders River which empties into the Gulf.

Bradfield’s scheme and a similar idea from author Ion Idriess received considerable public support in the years after the end of the Second World War.

It’s a seductive idea to use the abundant rainfall in one part of Australia to feed other areas that are parched, but there are good reasons why 80 years on no government has ever implemented the scheme.

It is both impractical and uneconomic.

As the book “Australia's Water Resources: From Use to Management” (2003) says the New South Wales Water Resource Commission examined the Clarence-Border Rivers proposal in the 1980s and while they found inter-basin water transfer was feasible in engineering terms the capital cost would be $656m and the annual cost would be around $130 per ML.

One would assume those costs have risen by several orders of magnitude since then.

That’s even before you start looking at the environmental, coastal and riverine impacts.

It’s good Ms Hanson wants to help solve the problems of the drought. But creating a bloated and environmentally disastrous white elephant at taxpayers’ expense is not the way to do it – Derek Barry