Warragamba Dam is spilling again, but it didn’t have to be this way. There have been warnings for decades about the state of Australia’s water assets, the bulk of which have been silenced or pushed aside for ‘environmental’ and ‘cultural’ reasons.

Sydney’s wet weather is not unusual or catastrophic. There is no reason a modern civilisation should be in the situation of handling dam spillage if the advice of former NSW governments had been taken seriously and acted upon.

More than 2,000 years ago, with nothing but basic tools and hard work, the Romans turned deserts into Edenesque cities with hundreds of...