How can a dam upgrade to secure water for Tamworth be 'outrageous'?

Homo sapiens have been on the planet for around 300,000 years. For about 290,000 of those years, we were tossing rocks and sticks at slow moving animals to throw in a fire and eat.

About 10,000 years ago we worked out we can eat grass seeds such as one called wheat. This allowed us to stand still for a while and do some interesting things such as learning to read and write.

At this point, the last three per cent of 300,000 years we became more interested in water as without it the grass died, the family became very thirsty and life became pretty miserable.

Humankind now spent a lot more time around permanent water or moved it from where it was permanent to where they were living.

It was essential to have a reliable water supply for agriculture and to drink. Humankind developed a new social construct, towns.

In about the last 200 years, two per cent of the last 10,000 of our 300,000 we started getting vastly more focused on the politics of water.

You can't just steal all of downstream's water, or their tribe will come and attack you. We have to share water and can't just leave the river as a gully of dry rocks or tip our sewerage into it.

Lately, however, self-evident logic has handed the reins over to a cult that believes it is noble to do nothing further with water and much of what we currently do, such as water the garden, wash the dog poo off the path, grow food etc is environmentally morally repugnant.

This, in a large part, is the same cult that thinks you can run a modern economy on intermittent electricity from windmills.

Dams are now evil and the only water policy we hear about is the one where we must stop using it.

The problem with this is that it is one of the crucial issues that has taken us from chasing and eating lame antelopes as we wandered aimlessly and semi naked across the land to living in cities working on keyboards and going to the cricket.

The city of Tamworth is a classic example of this new perverse religious order of the current cult.

If we had not fought tooth and claw for the extension of Chaffey Dam, Tamworth would have run out of water.

One of the main impediments to this essential increase in public infrastructure was an amphibian, the Booroolong frog.

The edicts that came from high priest environmental scientists showed the enlightened were quite prepared to run a city of now 70,000 people out of water for a frog.

Later to stop an upgrade to Dungowan Dam the high priests plucked a cost of 1.3 or so billion dollars out of the air (or somewhere else) and said, well isn't that terrifying, we can't do it.

They were not very forthcoming in how they came up with this number, so it is a wonder it was not a trillion dollars and your second kidney.

I have now asked NSW Minister Rose Jackson at the Murray Darling Association meeting in the Tamworth town hall to provide me with the numbers that come up to $1.3 billion.

Let's see if they ever turn up in an authentic clear form, I doubt it very much.

It would make a great yarn for any media outlet that has not drunk the cool aid on this modern-day year zero cult.

Isn't it amazing how the business case for hundreds of billions of dollars spent on intermittent power swindle factories, fields of a new photovoltaic black, 28,000 kilometres of new transmission lines, very temporary power from pump hydro and merely hourly power from batteries all make abundant sense but a dam upgrade for water security for the city of Tamworth is outrageous.