It's a tad simplistic to argue that "We are building a very large recycling plant, a fine idea, but for this to work you have to have water to recycle. Recycling plants are not a lot of help if the dams are dry. Desalination is new water, recycled water is not, a distinction none to clear in everyone's heads yet, it seems."

If you have no water supply, it's true of course that recylcling serves no purpose. However, unless no rain at all is falling in the catchment areas, Brisbane does have a water supply. The problem is that the supply is not sufficient to meet demand.

Recylcing can be seen as a mechanism to reduce net demand so that it matches the supply. In addition, in the shorter term, it extends the life of the existing contents of the reservoirs until other options, such as desalination can be implemented. My only concern here is that with only 18 months supply left, can even a recycling scheme be constructed in time?

Governments seem to want to leave water solutions until the last possible moment. The problem is that determination of that moment depends on assumptions about rainfall. If you reach that moment, and then rainfall deteriorates, then the last moment shifts to an earlier point in time, meaning that the solution is too late.

Governments are basically adminstrators. For some reason, risk management seems to be beyond administrators of all kinds, whether they're working for the water company, or for NASA.

Sylvia.

Why is it that when it's already nearly too late everyone is starting to panic about water? As Australians we 'waste' far too much water in our need to have acres of lush green lawns out the front of our homes and absolutely no requirement for our residents or industries to recycle water. Piping water from the Burdekin is fine, when it's full, but its only two years since it was almost empty and that would not have helped south east Queensland at all. South east Queensland receives the majority of all Queensland government funding, and perhaps it may just have been misdirected into cross-city tunnels etc. when modification of water infrastructure, a public education campaign and the instigation of a programme of fines for any non-compliance with permanent restrictions on water use, would have been more pertinent.
All through my childhood we caught our own water (living in the country) and we always used the bath and shower water on the garden. We managed to have a huge vegetable garden, a green lawn, big gardens and maintain a backyard swimming pool and a family of 8 on one 40,000 litre tank.

If this is true that Brisbane could run out of water in 8 months then this is serious. It is doubtful you can construct much in that timeframe. Have they banned swimming pools yet on the gold coast? I mean, many of those residents don't use them anyway, they are just ornamental value.

The idea of the Norther Rivers could work if the Howard Plan cuts some red tape between the States. That haggling over borders is childish when such serious consequences are in the balance.

In the meantime, it sounds like the desalination plan for the Gold Coast is waranted. You can't recycle water you don't have it in the fistplace. Brisbane is also building the recyling project. Will it be completed too late? They also need to keep looking for aquifers.

It is astonishing that Las Vegas in the desert of the US is the fastest growing city, and in the Middle east, Dubai is the fastest growing city, full of water and wealth. Dubai never thought twice about desalinated water. Yes, it is in the Sahara, but no, in Australia, this continent has a lack of aquifers. We can't follow Las Vegas for that simple reason.

What a dry continent we live on. We went without planning for too long.

What a classic bit of metrocentric drivel. Dudes wont even fund a decent road to the burdekin for the use of real Queenslanders but the moment the urban punters get a sniff of dry weather they want to build a pipeline that will cost stacks more than the recent price rises.

The South East doesn't know how to get by with less water because they haven't even tried yet. You could ask any farmer but, of course, farmers don't know anything, do they?

There are some really good solutions that have yet to make it into the urban mind. But as long as they keep voting for people who protect mass murderers then they can just wallow in the problems of their own making. Why should rural people lift a finger to help people who continually vote for people who treat us with contempt?

And by the way, all the experts who think they can just wave a wand and take someone elses water from the Burdekin or Northern NSW have left out a major part of the costing. That is the cost of repairing the constant damage from sabotage by people who have had their water stolen.

Ravenscroft is absolutely correct - about 18 months' worth of water left for Brisbane unless we get good rain. That means, having now moved into autumn, that we have only one more shot left - the summer of '07/'08. Desperate times do call for desperate measures. Long term solutions, unfortunately are no longer of any use - nor are recriminations. We need something which gets us water, and lots of it, within 18 months.

While Russ was certainly a big man, the eponymous dam is not of similar stature. Sufficient only for the Gold Coast. Piping water from the Hinze dam to Brisbane probably only gets us a few months, and the Hinze catchment hasn't been getting a lot of rain either.

The Burdekin storage is much larger, and is much more regularly replenished by reasonably reliable rain. (No shortage of alliteration here today!). It has the potential to supply Brisbane, but at a huge cost. I fear that inertia will reign (puns abound as well) and there will be much sitting on hands, while our politicians find the most useful thing they can do is to lead us in prayer. Please select your preferred deity here: http://www.godchecker.com/

Perhaps we'll get lucky and we'll have a good cyclone season next year and there'll be water coming over the spillway. It seems to be the only solution on the horizon.

To suggest that any Queenslander should have needed to lobby for security of water supply is downright insulting. This was an accepted basic responsibility of all Australian State governments throughout the last century. Attention to it was effectively a duty of care for all elected to government over those years. Some fulfilled that duty; others, more recently, would seem to have acted in dereliction of it. That dereliction was an outright betrayal of the fundamental interests of those whom governments are sworn to represent. Queenslanders have every right to call for political blood! To have the political heirs of the duty-derelictors continue to set the course of the ship of State in water policy without any accountability is not merely fatuous, it may well be downright dangerous.

"In Queensland we should stop squabbling about which politicians should have done what and get on and solve this problem once and for all." Are you a front man for the present Queensland government, Peter? Or a front man for a prospective private water supply consortium wanting to build a pipeline into the State Treasury and a reverse-reticulation network into every taxpayer's pocket? It looks like you are trying to bum-rush everyone into a panicked approval of government action that is only going to solve the wrong problem, and in the process surrender control over water to foreign interests.

It is looking like a major cause of the prolonged drought in the existing dam catchments has been the waste water disposal practices of metropolitan conurbations. KAEP's posts in this forum explain various aspects of these practices. Use the forum tools: find and read these posts!

More to the point, it seems the Queensland government has long known this, but has chosen not to tell the public that drinking its own sewage is a necessary corollary to the conversion of a public management cost into a secret profit opportunity for foreign utility corporations. It is to be hoped the State Governor is up with the game. A biography of Sir Philip Game, that is. Things could be that serious.