Perseus,

1. If every new house has a very large tank, it won’t reduce current demand on the public system one iota. Existing houses, as well as unit blocks and businesses need to install tanks to a pretty significant extent as well, along with water conservation measures, to reduce the demand on current water supplies to a point that we can all feel comfortable with. That is, to a point where the supply capability will confidently provide this essential resource during the driest of times.

2. There is a potential trap with large tanks. If they are taken up on a large scale in the belief that they drought-proof us but this fails to be true, then as growth continues, the demand on the public system could still be considerably greater than it currently is during really dry times. So the public system still has to keep up its supply capability for the rapidly increasing population.

3. Once people have large tanks and still have the public supply to fall back on, many are not likely to be particularly conservative with their water usage. So what may appear to be drought-proofing tanks may only serve to increase water usage in many cases.

4. There is also the prospect of tanks becoming a source of some disease or another, or probably much more likely; of the populace being spooked into not using their tank water due to some such scare. Again, the public system needs to remain strong, keep up with the ever-increasing potential demand, and be ready for sudden massive increases in demand.

continued

5. Even if water conservation measures and alternative sources (predominantly tanks) are implemented on a large scale, and the population keeps on growing at anything like the current rate, we are still going to have supply problems. Water tanks can potentially give us a several hundred percent improvement, but in the real world, this will probably be vastly less. Also, this improvement is a one-off. Once water tanks have been widely installed, that’s it, there’s minimal room for further improvement in that manner. Compare this to a 2 or 3% per annum rate of population growth. This will lead to a 100% increase in demand, all else being equal, in something like 25 years, and a 300% increase in about 50 years. So, what might seem like a small rate of pop growth, is in fact very substantial.

There are no two ways about it. SEQ needs a population policy that will have declared limits to growth. It will implement methods whereby that overall limit and whatever regional limits might be declared within that, are approached in a gentle manner and as equitably as possible. Come on – this sort policy is practiced on some islands with growth or visitor pressure, for obvious reasons. It is time to extend this simple concept to regions with growth pressure.

Local government regulates building approvals and thus decides on what development can occur where. Well, overall limits to development are just an extension of this. It is completely and utterly absurd and irresponsible, in areas with obvious negative impacts from growth, not to implement a management strategy that includes limits to growth.

Perseus, it is not like you to abandon a debate like this.
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In today’s Sunday Mail there was a ‘Waterwise Special’ section several pages long. It covers lots of good ideas on water conservation, including harvesting your roof water. But of course, there is not a mention of population stabilisation or the need to stop the demand from continuously increasing.

There is also an article by Andrew Bolt, which expresses support for Premier Beatty’s new dam approvals and is highly critical of the greenies or the concepts of environmental flows or protection of endangered species blah blah…. the normal polarised expression from Mr Bolt with no attempt to present any semblance of balance.

But worse, he writes “Its(Southeast Queensland’s) population is booming and its water use is tipped to soar by half again by mid century” and then proceeds to say absolutely nothing about the notion to reducing or capping this population growth. It is the same old enormous blind spot – the same old, ‘oh we’ve got growth, so we have to pander to it, rather do anything about it’ mentality. Either this, or his bosses won’t even allow a mention of the possibility of even thinking about the notion of possibly even considering mitigating population growth!

It is appalling, and it makes a complete mockery of Bolt’s expression on the whole subject. But then, that’s nothing new.