Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink

In the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge says it all, although for different reasons but if we’re not carefull a poem from the 1800s could herald the problems of today. Water is a problem in Australia and always has been but it’s more of a management problem than one of supply. Travel the country and you will have to agree with me. Uncapped bores at Coorabulka, open irrigation channels in the Murry Irrigation Area and uncountable megalitres of water emptying into the Cambridge Gulf in NW Australia. We just haven’t been serious and we have to change. I have just had the Water Wise plumber, employed by the Brisbane City Council, at my home and that programme is a good start. All taps checked and given new washers when needed, All showers checked for restricted flow valves and replaced where necessary. Even taps over hand basins, the kitchen sink and in the laundry now have restricted flow. The main shower now flows at 9li per minute rather than 20 and the shower effect is the same. The cost of his visit of about two hours…..$20.00. I have ordered a water tank (3,000 li) and will water the garden with rain water through an irrigation system. I will order a cover for the pool to limit evapouration and likewise save on power with less filtering requirement during winter. All of this, of course, is bandaide treatment to a much larger problem. My water rates will drop (quantatively..but watch the cost per litre rise) and if every house owner does something it will make a difference. We do have to water-discipline ourselves but the governments have to react to the infrastructure shortfalls. I agree with Howard when he says the federal government should be controlling the nation’s water and the case of Queensland offers the best reaon for this. For almost a decade now, politicians in the sunshine state have been paying lip service to infrastructure while bragging about the thousands of southerners that are attracted to move to state every month. We grow and the infrastructure remains stagnant. There is no way known that a state government can express surprise when the state runs out of water. It’s only now that Beatty is talking about building a dam and connecting the current dams with pipes to try and drought proof SE Queenlsand. Caught out unprepared but the everyone forgives him and doesn’t ask the hard questions like ” A new dam will take years to build and should have been started 5 years ago..why only bring it up now? The Greens hold too much sway with the Labour state governments with the result that the lung fish and obscure frogs take an unnatural place in the food chain above humans. Madness. If the waters rise the lung fish can move up or down stream and as they have already survived millennia of drought and flood I’m a little more circumspect about who’s who in the food chain than the Greenies. Lyndsay Tanner writes;

EVERYWHERE you look, Australia has a problem with water. After decades of overuse and waste, water resources are under extreme pressure. There’s no shortage of water, it’s just that most rain falls in the lightly populated north and we use water incredibly wastefully. Our population is only slightly larger than the Netherlands, but the volume of rain which falls on Australia is roughly 90 times greater. The emerging water crisis should not come as a big surprise.

Which is all well and good but the only person castigated in his piece is Howard while the states have played a major part in the current crisis. I’ve long been saying we need to address the problem with the scale of something like the Snowy River Scheme. C.Y. O ‘Connor started building a pipe line from Perth to Kalgoorlie in 1898 and finished in 1902 covering a distance of some 400 hundred miles and opening up the famous ‘Golden Mile’. I continually read that the idea of piping from the very wet northern tropical zones the the South East populated zones is uneconomically viable. Well, we need to stop listening to the accountants and start listening to some visionaries If C.Y.O’Connor can do what he did in the 1880s what can we do with todays technology. We are building gas pipe lines all over the place in Queensland hundreds of kilometres long and are we not planning an East Timor- Darwin pipe line that will have to be some 800 kms long? We have the technology and the motivation so all we are discussing is the cost. We have raised billions by levies to buy back guns and to save Ansett pilots from poverty. Could we not consider a long term levy or government bonds like war bonds to finance any such project? I don’t know…just thinking!