The NSW government’s decision to revive development on the Hawkesbury floodplain ignores long-established flood risks, evacuation limits and the growing impact of climate change.

It goes on and on. Governments in New South Wales seem unable to resist developing new suburbs in the valley of the Hawkesbury River on Sydney’s north-western fringe. Huge flood disasters are still being courted.

This time it’s an ALP government, but it has been the Coalition in the past. The plan was for a 6000-dwelling development at Marsden Park North which would have housed close to 20,000 people, but ministers Paul Scully (Planning) and Pru Car (Deputy Premier) have announced that it will be scaled back to 960 dwellings for about 3000 residents. Marsden Park North is on South Creek, a tributary of the Hawkesbury which enters the main stem of the river just below Windsor and up which huge backwater flows can occur during floods. A big Hawkesbury flood would create the largest and most complex flood evacuation one could imagine in NSW, and a failure to bring it off might lead to a death toll of epic proportions.

The problem of Hawkesbury floods is far from new. The valley has always been a magnet for development and its floods have been problematic since the first decade of settlement there in the 1790s. Governor Lachlan Macquarie sought to discipline farmer settlement in the Windsor area between 1810 and 1820, with little success, and since World War II suburban growth........

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