Rainwater in southeast Queensland costs the average homeowner $1.45/KL. This is based on Brisbane receiving 80% (917MM) of its mean annual rainfall for the next 30 years, which will provide an average separate house with rainwater yield of at least 65KL/year (assuming 175 square metre roof area).

The government can require all building owners to detain rainwater before it may be discharged into the stormwater system. This gives a person the incentive to use rainwater in replacement of mains drinking water, and to discharge only tank overflow it into the stormwater system.

Such a mandatory detention requirement can apply at point of sale of all property. The average turnover rate of housing is seven years and there are 700,000 houses in southeast Queensland, providing steady demand to warrant significant investment in production facilities and installation services for rainwater tanks.

The cost of rainwater compares with desalinated seawater at $1.15/KL - $3.00/KL and indirect potable re-use (sewage recycling) $1.68/KL - $2.61/KL.
Source: Marsden Jacob http://www.marsdenjacob.com.au/Documents/MJA_2006_ResearchNotesSecuringAustraliasUrbanWaterSupplies.pdf table 1.

Greg Cameron

Recently the ABC televised a National Press Club address by a prominent american environmentalist from Montana. When she was asked for opinions on the Murray Darling water management she remarked that americans had experience of the water basins being managed by companies with boards of directors outside the water basins. These management authorities had taken decisions that adversely affected people living in the water catchments and the locals had subsequently wrestled back control of their water. She said that responsibilty for managing water resources should rest with the people who lived in the catchment whose children and grandchildren would have to live with the consequences of the decisions made.

Like the author I am very suspicious of attempts to privatise the water and note that the Water Minister still has to face court in relation to HIH because of his role as a director of Goldman Sachs. (AFR 9/2/2007)

I thought the Water Minister sounded repetitious and very lame on his interview with Kerry O'Brien last night.

Yet another essential piece of infrastructure sold out by our wonderful liberalists. In this case, the champions of privatisation; the ALP.

I don't mind the foreign company building the system but to own it is absurd and nothing short of treason. Infrastructure, essential services etc should be at the hands of the locals through state ownership. Allow local boards be set up by the surrounding communities.

It is not financially wise to save water for everytime a community gets together cutting their water usage, they end up paying big time with out of control bills. Watch this space people for outpricing water is the quickest way of culling the human race.

It is interesting to see the comparative estimated costs of water collected from roof runoff against that for desalinated water, in Greg Cameron's post above. If proposing expansion of urban on-site rainwater detention (together with other demand management techniques: see OLO article http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5421) as a component of water supply security is currently valid, then it must be at least as valid to also focus upon desalination as part of the attainment of such urban and domestic water supply security.

A distinguishing feature of the provision of desalinated seawater is that it is IN ADDITION to that which otherwise may be available from stored rainfall or groundwater, including any recycled derivatives thereof. There is total reliability of supply of seawater, even under prolonged drought conditions.

One would think that with such a concentration of the urban reticulated water demand so close to the sea almost everywhere in Australia, desalination of seawater would be a very attractive challenge for water supply authorities.

Instead we see a roadblock thrown up. Desalination is energy demanding! Desalination will result in more GHG emissions! Desalination will pollute the sea with salt! No desalination! And just look at who's saying it! Amongst others, the Queensland Premier! And look at who effectively agrees with him: the Prime Minister and patron of the federal Minister for Water (and Constitutional Change)!

What a colossal failure of imagination! There is probably no more ideal opportunity for the application of permanently freely available non-pollutant energies than there is in the pumping ashore and reduced-pressure distillation of seawater. Large scale temperature inversion solar pondage using concentrated brine to collect solar energy, developed in conjunction with wave power pumping, is of immediate relevance in cost-effective desalination by the reduced-pressure distillation pathway.

Could it be that the real objection to desalination is that it offers a viable 'nursery' for the development of an essentially low-tech, non-pollutant, and above all NON-PROPRIETARY pathway for attainment of urban (and indeed, non-urban) water supply security for much of Australia?

The privatization of the water catchments and pipe lines are the latest attempts by government and big business to end any concept of a universal right to water and sanitation and to turn water into a commodity to exploit. Behind the backs of the public, there is much talk of the windfall profits through levering large charges this criminality will eventually bring in.
A conversation in the corridors of power might precede thus, “Water turned into gold with a captive market and monopoly.” “But wait, here is the rub, the public pays for the dam probably a few times over, and then we give it to our mates and the public can still continue paying taxes for a dam they do not own plus high water charges.”

The water infrastructure will see the governments hive off the most profitable parts to their well heeled cronies. As in most other dams that have been privatized there were immediate staff sackings and cost cutting particularly in water sample testing with disastrous consequences. What most do not see is the process that is taking place, and that is to lower and debase every aspect of life including rights, equality, poverty and life itself. Privatization is the accelerant for this process to take place!

One word to describe the liberalist politicians; Treasonous.

My apologies to Selwyn Johnston. I did not suggest answers to the two questions his article poses. My post above strove to suggest something positive by way of possible solution, rather than just offering empty [albeit so very well deserved] criticism of now all too obvious policy failings. I now realize a solution to the shortage is not really wanted.

Selwyn's first question was: "How did this situation [that of SE Queensland having insufficient water reserves] come about?"

The other question was: "Why is the Beattie government out-sourcing Queensland's water management?"

As an answer to the first question, can I suggest that the situation of having insufficient water reserves was deliberately brought about by covert government policy? The Goss-Palaszczuk effect the author describes, one not arising from shortsightedness, but from deliberate intent!

Answering Selwyn's first question this way, however, begs the question as to why on earth any government would deliberately engineer a shortage of water reserves. I suggest it might do so if it was the case that government had become privy to knowledge that its own (mis)management of WASTE water had been, or promised to be, a cause of significant relatively localized climatic disruption inducive of drought. Especially so if this knowledge was not possessed by, or had been deliberately kept from, the public at large.

The answer to the second question, in the context of government having been arguably long mismanaging waste water, is that by out-sourcing water management at a time of (artificial) shortage it will appear more 'necessary' to recycle sewage back into the reticulated supply.

It would, of course, be difficult to convince electors that the same politicians that were responsible for mismanagement and pressure put upon basic resources by other policies such as migration should continue to oversee water management. Out-sourcing water management gets the politicians/bureaucrats out from under before the real cost of this redirection of waste flows becomes public knowledge.

Cover up! Make the public pay top dollar to drink their own sewage, and think themselves well off to be doing so!

"Water is a failure of successive governments" ?

No, it is a perfect outcome from an “Australian education and way of doing”.

I note Selwyn Johnston's intended candidacy for the federal seat of Leichhardt at the next federal elections. He would do well if he matched his concern at the outsourcing of water management in Queensland with concern at the outsourcing of the security of electoral papers basic to the integrity of federal elections. This latter outsourcing of the security of electoral papers, to wit the marked certified lists used to record vote claims at elections, took effect several years before the Goss-Palaszczuk decision to abort the Wolfdene dam project in SE Queensland.

The use of the term 'outsourcing' in relation to the security of the marked certified lists during a federal election is really to use a misleading euphemism. The proper term would really be 'institutionalization of an ongoing security breach'. The outsourcing of optical mark reading of marked certified lists by the Australian Electoral Commission to a firm called Endata Pty Ltd in 1987, an outsourcing that resulted in the release of the marked rolls during the period between polling day and the end of the period during which an election could be challenged in the court of disputed returns, constitutes a breach of the Commonwealth Electoral Act. That Act requires that all such papers remain within the custody of the Divisional Returning Officers throughout this period. Marked certified lists have continued to be mishandled in this way ever since.

If ever there was to be large scale fraudulent vote claiming at federal elections, this institutionalized security breach provides an opportunity for removal of possible documentary evidence thereof.

For outsourcing of water management to be seriously considered by Australian governments, State or Federal, is really only believable if elections are rigged on a large scale, and profoundly influence the composition of all parliamentary political parties.

Grants of monopoly of supply of an absolute necessity with profit guaranteed by the power of taxation.

It is a curious fact that a one-time director of Endata Pty Ltd is recorded as having the birth-place of Denver, Colorado, USA. Colorado, where, as the saying goes, "water runs uphill to money"!

“Grants of monopoly of supply of an absolute necessity with profit guaranteed by the power of taxation.”

“Eatable” English, please.
Playing words helps a little for executing particular technical/engineering issues beneficial to a society and country at whole rather than to fat cats syphoning money offshore English colony of Australia.

In commenting upon Selwyn Johnston's article in my second post above I have suggested that successive governments (not only in Queensland) have deliberately cancelled planned investment in water storage infrastructure, cancellations that are now seen as having eroded water reserves that may otherwise have dealt with drought conditions. I have further suggested that this may have been done to achieve two ends.

The first being to create a profit opportunity for 'privatized' foreign investment in a water supply monopoly.

The second being to cover up the role of government over the years in urban waste water mismanagement, mismanagement that may well have exacerbated the drought conditions that are seen as underlying present shortages and restrictions.

I cannot take credit for providing evidential backup for the suggestion that waste water mismanagement may have exacerbated the drought. What appears to be evidence for that claim has been presented on this forum by another regular contributor, KAEP, from December 2004 until the present. Out of a total of 366 posts made over that interval by KAEP, 107 have related directly to the science of regional climate distortion effects of sea surface pollution arising largely from urban waste water disposal practices. Some of the most informative, in my opinion, are:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4053#28946

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4186#32856 "Throughout history, scientific breakthroughs have come mainly from the public's imagination."

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4194#38655

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4938#56111

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=5214#65040

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=5421#69062

Interestingly, in one of KAEP's posts addressing the underlying population factor in water management ( http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=3505#8020 ), I find these concluding words: "Such audacity makes one wonder about the validity of the state electoral system. It is in my view, something that needs a closer examination." Too right.

These days that system is common to all States and the Commonwealth. Watch this, Selwyn.

There was a veeery short info about implementation of a federal government's pre-election promise to invest $50 Mln. in a fast broadband Internet. So far, $1.2 Mln. were put in mates' pockets as wages, and $200,000 - on technical improvements directly.

That is AUSTRALIAN way of doing - so, state governments were not so mistaken postponing feeding up the privileged to suck their wellbeing from public coffins.

There is stupidity, downright ignorance and gross negligence. All three were put on show when the Goss Gov decided to use the 'no dams' hysteria to defeat an exceptionally solid Minister in Ivan Gibb. Pallazchuk( as we pronounced it then) was a desperate in need of an issue to defeat a vastly superiour talent. He got his issue with the 'wolfdene', a dam that was perfectly located and of exceptional potential. Not only the shortsighted stupidity of mucking about with our most important resource, they showed profound ignorance of water as the neccessity of life and development of a region. The forward looking Ivan Gibb had a hand in listening to those who stated flatly that the Wolfdene was vital to future needs. How unfortunate the apologists for Goss and Rudd have placed the blame for their narrow minded stupidity on 'the drought'....precisely the reason we needed the Dam built then and there.
There is no limit to the condemnation that shjould be heaped upon their legacy. Their negligence is now reaping its whirlwind and poor Pete is desperately trying to find the solutions we need.
Pete; water is an essential resource. It must not be used by faceless men as a means of ripping off a gullible, believing pubic. It must be kept available at cost price rather than the false economy of a monopolistic predator.
And we will be short of water until we make up for that most G(r)oss of errors.
Greg

It was already noticed somewhere in this Forum, that playing English is not synonymous to engineering and forward-thinking but just an asset to delight some proficient in memorizing the word-spelling.

The major task humankind and Australia face today is departure from simply consuming the resources to re-use of precious sources. Dam is an engineering tool to harvest possibly existing rain-water as desalination and other processes have been used to producing potable quality water steadily in quantities required AND of various qualities due to different water consumers' particulars.

Surely, power consumption is significantly differs from simply pumping water from natural paddocks called “reservoirs”, making nuke power more embracing.