Woodyblues, I agree with most of your post.
I have 55,000 liters storage, & even in 93, & 94, with less than
500 ml of rain each year, it was adequate.

I do suggest that you try to throw off the brain washing you are suffering from. Don't be ashamed to have fallen for it, our leader is a master of the art.

This year we are at, or slightly above average rainfall from the Gold coast, to the Sunshine coast, & throughout Brisbane.

Sylvia, don't forget to add the minister as a new resident.

Actually the ones who concern me most are the types who stay for one or two terms and leave before the poo hits the fan (or tap in this case). They've done all the easy cost cutting and move onto the next easy mark before it all falls to bits.

I also expect that human nature being what it is the lure of the big dollars will override the warnings of boffins insisting on the continuation of some maintenance program the people getting the big money don't understand anyway. Either that or they will make sure they have some tame boffins to tell them what they want to hear.

I think my point is on topic becaause for those of us who are not to bothered by the yuk factor and who accept that properly treated recycled water is cleaner than runnoff water that point, cost and lead times seem to be the main remaining issues. And also the viability of alternatives such as better use of rainwater tanks.

R0bert

It is easy to be at cross-purposes in this discussion. Sylvia makes the pertinent observation "It has always been easy to hope that the drought would end.". This provides the lead-in to a focus upon the level of past attention to fundamental duties by governments, and the emphasis upon their taking of the easy option in order to enable continuing avoidance of address of the underlying issues. The underlying issue is population pressure and standard of living expectations, and these issues none of our governments have been addressing.

The point is that in Toowoomba the fundamental level of representation-the electors-has been formally consulted and has given its verdict. That verdict is against recycling of sewage water for domestic use. This verdict closes off the easy option for the State government of pretending the problem is Toowoomba's alone, when, with the State government taking all the Toowoomba catchment rights for security of Brisbane supply, the problem rightly should not be Toowoomba's at all! This brings us back to Gadget's initial questioning as to what Beattie's seemingly magnanimous offer of choice to the wider electorate in SE Queensland (and yet again to Toowoomba electors) is really about. He wants a re-run of the referendum in a wider electorate, most of whose electors he believes can be persuaded will face no foreseeable prospect of having to do what Toowoomba has already rejected, in the hope that the 'easy option', recycling of sewage, will be open to his government again. If he can secure by whatever means, the referendum result he (and the Federal government) wants, he can ride roughshod over the decision the Toowoomba electors have already made and tell them to either recycle sewage or go without water.

Bad as that outcome would be for the residents of Toowoomba, it would be worse for SE Queensland and Australia at large. The focus would be taken off the underlying causes of shortage, the many ACCEPTABLE alternatives for water supply, and appropriate demand managment techniques for the growth areas that most contribute to this problem.

Hi I am a Toowoomba Resident

1. Demand mangement; Autralians have a right to choose when and where they live, this resonates much deeper than how they get their water. As a Toowoomba resident I would love to see the Day we have 200,000 people here and when Brisbane/Gold Coast are seen as corporate alternatives to Melbourne. Last year South East Queensland had net migration of just over 1000 people a week.

2. All water is recycled water.

3. There are ONLY 2 cost effective options 1. Recycling, 2. Farm diversion. The second option could be in the form of universal water charges that would shift farm produciton away from inefficent uses such as cotton & rice towards more productive crops and grazing. We as a country need to accept that we possess a competitive advantage in land and soil quality not water, each Ha of Cotton costs australia lost $$ in food export since good land is forced to remain idle elsewhere. People seem to forget that we the taxpayers pay for.

4. Desalination, or piping water from north queensland are dreams, which if ever entertained would be regarded as ingenuous by posterity

4. If people don't want to drink the water that is their prerogative. In most of developed Asia and Europe, residents will habitually buy drinking water not because of recycling but because of industrial pollution of the water systems. Synthetic chemicals are MUCH more difficult to remove from water than biological contamination (typical residential waste water)

Reports by the Queensalnd government have found no clear cut alternative to recycling and has highlighted that neither desalination or long distance piping are prudent policies.

The refferendum will work, but not now, Australians cannot be told that the water is going to run out. They have never experienced dry taps and cannot imagine it as a possibility. When we get to the last 10% of water reserves the dams water quality will deteriorate and people will demand blood from government. The only option which will stop taps from going dry at this stage is rationing and recycling THE END

I have been reviewing some of the material on Toowoomba Water's website.

http://www.toowoombawater.com.au/media-releases/inthenews.html

As regards concerns about cost cutting compromising the safety of the sytem, I think particularly telling is this diagram showing how the system would work

http://www.toowoombawater.com.au/dmdocuments/HowWillOurWaterBeRecycled.pdf

It indicates that the purified water would not be fed directly back into the distribution system, but into Cooby dam, which is the nearest of Toowoomba's three dams. When water is extracted from a reservoir, it's not just a matter of opening a tap at the bottom. Instead, water is extracted from a level that is providing water of the optimum purity. One would expect any contamination arising from failures of the recycling plant as a result of misguided cost cutting to be detected long before the water ended up in consumers' taps. Given what the wildlife are doing in the water, the recycling plant should be the least of a person's concerns.

Regarding concerns that a future referendum would allow Toowoomba's decision to be made for it by voters who do not have a real risk of using this recylcling technology, that would clearly be wrong. It should be made clear to any people who get to vote in such a referendum that a yes vote would mean that they should reasonably expect to end up drinking recycled water.

From my minimal research, it appears that this technology is significantly cheaper than desalination (not surprising - desalination involves very high pressures), so a rational decision would be to use desalination only to make up losses in the system, and otherwise use this recycling technology not just in Toowoombah, but Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, to name a few.

Sylvia.

What helpful links, Sylvia. The first one is particularly revealing when considered in relation to some of the statements made by Daz, a claimed Toowoomba resident. As such, his statements should perhaps carry more weight than those of us who are not residents of either Toowoomba or SE Queensland.

Daz says "Au[s]tralians have a right to choose when and where they live, this resonates much deeper than how they get their water.". Seemingly so, and I don't think anyone would propose otherwise. It also seems, however, that Australians demand their right to live in a democracy, rather than an autocracy or witchdocracy, and that this resonates even deeper than their choice of just where to live or whether they can get a reasonable supply of water. For look at Sylvia's first link: there is not a shadow of a 'No' case anywhere! And yet a clear majority of those stupid Australian Toowoombanites voted 'No' in the referendum. The hide of them, in the face of all the information provided by the bureaucracy and countless Environmental Resposibilitists at public expense that they should vote only 'Yes'!

Daz says "The refferendum (sic) will work, but not now, Australians cannot be told that the water is going to run out." Too right, in both respects. It takes time and substantial electoral manipulation to make a referendum work, especially if it doesn't give the 'right' result first time. The majority of Australians in general, and Toowoombanites in particular, damn well know that if water is running short in such a soundly based community it can only be because the two tiers of government above its local government have been derelict in their duty. In this case available water has been diverted to other less entitled users.

Daz says "When we get to the last 10% of water reserves the dams water quality will deteriorate and people will demand blood from government." Wrong. People are demanding blood from government now, and Peter Beattie knows it. Lay some pipe, Peter. Make salt. Sacrifice a few witch-doctors to the rain gods!