The Water debate

How’s this for sheer ignorance?

IT’S like a horror story. Over the centuries, countless millions of people have died from drinking polluted water. The World Health Organisation tells us that 50,000 people per day are still dying from drinking polluted water. Yet, in southeast Queensland, we are being pressured by the state and local governments and the monopoly newspapers to accept recycled sewage being dumped into our dams. Recycled sewage is not safe and I’m telling you that as a fully qualified sewage treatment plant operator. R. Hobbs Carrara, Qld

fully qualified sewage treatment plant operator……mmm. Key words Hobbsie. Southeast Queendsland is first world not third. If it comes out of your tap it’s safe to drink and I think you will find we are talking about water extracted from the sewage system and chemically rendered potable, not the sewage itself. You’d think a fully qualified sewage etc would know the difference – just like a fully qualified Garbologist knows all about paper recycling….they do don’t they? Mind you, the water used by industry for cooling and cleansing most probably doesn’t have to be potable so even if we have to lay a separate pipe system to industrial areas I think in the long term it would impact on our overall consumption. Now that’s a matter for debate as Julie Allen from Camp Hill suggests

It’s all well and good to talk about selective use of recycled water for industry and agriculture (and in some cases that can be a practical option), but does it make sense to dig up cities to build a second pipeline network for recycled water beside a perfectly good existing network just to satisfy the uneducated, the scaremongers and those prone to phobias. Let’s face it – the people telling us that recycled water is safe to drink are the same people who have given us drinking water for the past 100 years. Why should we stop trusting them now?

Why indeed. In note this morning that CSIRO have stated that the current drought is just a part of the normal weather cycles we have on earth and not Global Warming. Makes sense to me and is based on science rather than the new Global Warming Gospel. The drought will end but if nothing else it has forced us to look more closely at water consumption and the lack of storage infrastructure occassioned by state governments actively pursueing the Greenie vote as Ray Duncan from Smithfield Heights, so eloquently points out.

THE only reason that there has been a sharp decline in investment in new dams in Queensland in the past decade is because of the Beattie Labor Government’s pathetic pandering to the greens in exchange for their preferences.

This is particularly evident in Cairns, where every time someone raises the prospect of a new dam, the greens howl long and loud and the proposal is immediately quashed. In the forgotten far north of Queensland, we are using a dam that was commissioned in the late 1970s for a population of 35,000. Now, in 2006, with a population close to 130,000, we have the same dam and permanent water restrictions (in the wettest part of Australia). The Beattie Government’s fear of a green backlash against any new dam proposal is holding the rest of us to ransom.

In one way I hope the drought doesn’t break to soon or the politicians will get away with having done nothing for decades and will not be forced to think big, beyond their next term, and fix the problem for once and for all. It can be done. We are not short of water in Australia. Go for a trip up north in the wet season if you don’t believe me. We are just short of competant water management.