 Here we go again. Fueled by the recent flooding in the north and drought in the south of the country, the Bradfield scheme is again making headlines. Who was Bradfield? What was his scheme? Dr John Bradfield was the engineer who designed the Sydney Harbour Bridge. His scheme proposed a system of pipes, tunnels, pumps and dams to divert river water from the tropical north across the Great Dividing Range and into inland Australia. The Bradfield scheme. Bradfield claimed that this would solve our water problems and fuel agricultural production, but he was wrong. Importantly, this water is needed for coastal fisheries in the north. It's not wasted. And it wouldn't make the desert bloom. Water would be lost to evaporation and get soaked up by floodplains and wetlands. To avoid the loss of water, more than 2,000 kilometres of pipe and infrastructure would need to be built and the construction and ongoing costs would be financially prohibitive. Finally, the extra water would change the ecology of our inland rivers and result in the extinction of many species that require the variability of flood and drought to survive. In short, implementing the Bradfield scheme would be an economic and environmental disaster.