I think it would be foolish to revert back to our old water-wasting days.Most of us are used to and comfortable with observing the current Wednesday-Sunday AM PM garden watering.And whats so bad about washing the car with a watering can.
We live on the driest continent so lets keep a healthy respect for H2o.

Good idea and while we're at it let's build high domed roofs over all the dams to cut down evaporation.

Water is no longer a resource and has become a saleable commodity in many council areas.

I should be entitled to use as much water as I can afford to pay for.

In other words, as long as I can pay the bill I am allowed to waste as much water as I like.

Maybe it's time for a re-think on how it is being managed.

Soon it will be privatised and from previous experience, it will then be too late.

We should view water as a finite commodity that we have no right to waste.
Now in perceptual abundace, it may one day be worth more than gold.
I think we should teach our kids a new appreciation of water and add the concept that without it we can no longer exist.

Why make a virtue out of a necessity?

Water restrictions have increased to the point where I know of people whose gardens are dying for lack of water. (And while they are dying they still permit wealthy people to build swimming pools. Close to me on my inner city block there are no fewer than four swimming pools on the region bounded by the roads enclosing the area in which my house is located.) In Queensland, elderly people, who are forced to water their gardens with buckets of water rather than with hoses, are suffering injuries from the weights they must carry.

I have always been a frugal user of all natural resources including water. However the restrictions are even hard for me to comply with these days.

The principle reason why there is a water crisis in Queensland should be blindingly obvious. Queensland's population doubled to 4 million between 1974 and 2005. In spite of the fact that our dams are running dry and the residents of the Mary Valley stand to have their communities sitting atop good agricultural land inundated with water to meet the growth in demand for water, the Queensland Government aims to increase the population of South East Queensland alone by another 1.1 million by 2026?

What is the reason for this stupidity? Queenslanders don't need more people. With proper government planning and training of people we have more than what we need now.

It is done for no reason other than to suit land speculators and property developers who need ever larger numbers of people to increase the value of their investment. In order to enrich themselves they are prepared to sacrifice the quality of life of everyone else, the environment, other species who are now being driven to extinction in South East Queensland, and future generations.

By all means we must do what we can to get throught the crisis that unblelievably irresponsible political leaders like John Howard, Peter Beattie and Anna Bligh (see http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=818#14696) have caused, but let's stop making the crisis any worse than it is now.

Considering water covers 2/3 of the planet and is found in every cloud floating by I suspect that it would be difficult even for propaganda pumping governments to create a situation where it was considered as valuable as gold. I wouldn't think the public would be that stupid.

Why don't you just face the fact that governments haven't built the infrastructure needed to manage the resource for a dry continent and an expanding population and they take the heat off their faux paus by putting everything on the general populus. How many dams have been built in your state in the last 10 years? We need to observe restrictions currently because they have put us in this situation but there is no need to flagellate ourselves over the issue indefinitely. I heard today that the desalination plants that were rejected by the powers that be are all over the middle east. The government just doesn't want to pay for them when they can spend our money on things that can more directly improve their popularity.

That evaporation limiting idea put forward in here is interesting. I wonder if it is achievable. Dams have a huge surface area so there must be a whole heap of evaporation going on. My swimming pool used to be extremely thirsty. It was quite stressful for a while when the water restrictions started kicking in and I needed to pump in hundreds of litres every week. Then I got a pool cover and the level just keeps going up rather than down. I haven't looked back. Yet dams seem to have a much larger surface area to volume ratio. I wouldn't expect them to go up if covered due to the draining but I bet an incredible water loss would be stopped.