"Plain speaking" government representatives should come to the Mary Valley and explain the Governmment's new position on the Traveston Crossing Dam, in south-east Qld, anti-dam campaigner Kevin Ingersole said yesterday.
But he is unsure if Premier Anna Bligh would get a good reception.
The State Government on Tuesday announced the proposed dam at Traveston Crossing would be "delayed by several years" to minimise environmental risks.
While Mary Valley residents earlier said they believed the announcement meant the dam would be scrapped, they now are unsure, Mr Ingersole said.
However, he is also unsure if he wants the Premier herself to come to Gympie and explain the delay.
"What I would like to see is the Government, whether it is Anna Bligh - I don't know that Anna Bligh would get a very good reception - but it would be good if the the government was prepared to send a few sensible, plain-speaking people up to the Valley with all the facts and data," Mr Ingersole said.
In November 2006, Bligh, as Deputy Premier, was heckled as she fronted 2000 people at a meeting in Gympie to explain changes to the Traveston Crossing Dam.
In State Parliament yesterday, Member for Gympie David Gibson asked Ms Bligh if she intended to travel to the area to explain the delay in the project, but she did not directly answer the question.
Ms Bligh later told journalists she had "no immediate plans" to travel to Gympie, but she intended to be there "in the next 12 months" because of the work underway.
Mr Ingersole today said the Government would be making a mistake if it continued to dismiss the Save the Mary River campaign.
"We used the same computer simulation software for modelling the performance of the dam that the Government does," he said.
"We are licensed by the New South Wales Government to use it - the Queensland Government wouldn't license us."
Mr Ingersole said the real questions needed to be asked of the Government surrounded the "sliding price" of water produced by desalination plants, and the need for the Traveston Dam when there were still environmental concerns two years after the project was announced.
"The National Water Commission just recently released a 90-page document on desalination," he said.
"And one of the points that they made in this document is that the cost of desalination is plummeting like a stone."
He said all international experts acknowldge that older desalination technology was energy intensive.
He said, "But that is an old paradigm - the new technology is not that energy intensive at all".
Mr Ingersole said Government comparisons also never took into account the reliability of water from a dam, compared with supply from a desalination process.
Ms Bligh said on Tuesday the proposed Traveston Dam would have been "full and overflowing" nine times in the past six years based on Sunshine Coast rainfall figures.
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