QLD has ditched plans for a referendum and are going ahead with water recycling:

http://ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1165390401

Hopefully this will put an end to that stupid scheme for a desal plant at the gold coast. We need to start charging people for water. I pay about 15c per person per day for water. That's hardly an incentive to use less.

Huge desalination plants, recycled sewage, piping water from the Ord River to Perth or from the wet tropics to Brisbane or even Sydney, charging everyone much more in order to reduce per capita consumption, perhaps even relocating a lot of our economic activity over time to areas of higher and more reliable rainfall….and even cloud-seeding and flooding lake Eyre in order to generate more rain in that region!

The ideas range from the apparently reasonable to the absurd, but in isolation or even in any combination, they are all absurd, for as long as they are promoted outside of a total sustainability strategy.

With the current stupid continuous unending population growth mentality, we are heading strongly away from sustainability, and any one or any combination of these ideas will facilitate this momentum, by allowing more and more people to be squeezed in, especially into areas that are now water-stressed.

A policy of sustainability, which has to include population stabilization and the matching of the demand for water with the supply capability, instead of just pandering a constantly increasing demand, is ESSENTIAL.

With such a policy in place, I could condone just about any measure to increase water supply rates and security of supply.

But in the absence of such a policy, it is hard to support any of these ideas.

So what you are talking about is population contol there Ludwig.

Good luck with that. Most people don't like to be told where they can or can't live. You probably won't either when they enact your policy.

Actually you need both.
With recycling, first catch your water. Recycling will not help many
towns as they will not have any water to recycle.
With desalination, the catch is it is at sea level, hmmm bit obvious.
It then needs to be pumpted uphill, very expensive.
Recycled water can be cleaned up near to where it was used so there is not so much pumping.
These reasons are why there is so much toing & froing about the whole problem.
To sum up either is a lot cheaper than moving towns or cities.
It all depends on how thirsty you get !

Doesnt have to be population control Bugsy. Just stop infrastructure development where you dont want further population growth, and start spending where you do. If people on the Gold Coast are permanently on heavy water restrictions, or even better, they actually run out, that will put the brakes on people moving there in droves. Or more likely, they will move there, work out its not as much fun as they thought, then move somewhere else.

Ludwig, you are correct - we need to work out how to live sustainably with the resources that we have. Whether the govt will do anything is another story. If the general population dont have to personally face shortages, there is no incentive to do anything about curtailing habits. That's why I am a proponent, of "let it run out".

Here's a few water saving tips from someone that has lived off rainwater in a low rainfall area. Ban showers and share a bath - start with the cleanest person and work your way through the family. Turn your hot water right up - hotter water = less water for activities that need it hot. Shut the bathroom door so the kids cant burn themselves. Wash up by hand once a day - start with the cleanest dishes and work through to the dirtiest. Dont rinse - use a tea towel to dry up. Its a 2 person job, so look at it as quality time together. Use a twin tub and do your washing once a week. Use the same water for the entire load - start with the cleanest...... (see a trend here).

I am really glad you two aren't running the country. You would send many thousands of families broke or force them to relocate and turn cities into ghost towns in the name of "sustainability". I guess you're thinking, "I'm alright Jack, bugger the rest of you"! Yes, everyone should live like you CountryGal, but the problem is that for many reasons- they don't. Live with it.