Thanks to James H for the interesting item on Veolia in SA. One of the comments Kenneth Davidson's editorial bears some reflection:

" ...the answer [to SA's water problem] might be tankers or tugs and water bags from Tasmania providing Tasmanians are prepared to sell a small fraction of the waste water that runs into the sea after generating hydro-electricity."

Waste water?
What? This terminology escapes me.

I can only assume KD sees the "used" hydroelectricity water as waste because it could be put to use better (in his opinion) on the mainland. I don't expect to hear him clarify. He may be interested (as may others) in a book called Wolf Totem, by Jiang Rong, published by Viking in 2004. It is a fictional chronicle of the settling of Inner Mongolia in the late '60's and early '70's. It is a well-told tale of resource utilisation and "development" which is very pertinent to an arid country like Australia.

Odo - thanks for your little bit of oxygen, to keep the argument burning: or was it phlogiston? Meanwhile, I await a substantive comment from you, on P-P Partnerships. You needn't have original ideas, you only need to openly attribute others' ideas to them.

It seems as though there's always a slide to more secretive government - not just in contract law, but right across the board.

It's mostly because movements toward transparency take greater effort and require a large lurch toward reform, whereas secrecy increases in small, easy bites.

Not all the news is bad though - I'm hoping the amended whistleblower legislation proves to have teeth, particularly in regard to protection of journalist sources.

The movements toward uniform defamation laws with greater clarity also provide some hope.

As for the contract law issues here, I think some pretty good points are raised here, particularly with large amounts of stimulus cash currently working their way through the economy via government contracts.