"It takes a lot of time to build desalination modules, three to...

"It takes a lot of time to build desalination modules, three to five years, and at considerable cost", Mr Winter said. "They're even costlier to build during a crisis."

I think Mr Kevin Winter, supposedly a water expert from the University of Cape Town's Future Water Institute, needs an update on containerised desal tech. Pretty sure, Fluence could have a 10 Nirobox plant up and running in 8-10 weeks and if the planning was right around the land available, then this could be expanded by 10 Nirobox's every 2-4 weeks, leading to a 50ml/day plant in 4-5 months, not 4 yrs!.....at a cost of $40m....not the stupid $4-5B and rising at $1m/wk that it cost for Melbourne's desal plant.

If you want to spread the work between multiple companies then spread it around....BUT MAKE BLOODY DECISIONS AND LET COMPANIES GET ON WITH IT.....this is what everyone hates about politicians and their continual talking and talking.....this marked increase in employment locally will also lead to families having greater short term income and so being able to afford bottled water. Pretty sure there will be some big companies looking at this and doing some figures on just how much bottled water they could fly in daily, if the taps do get turned off......making people walk to a water point every day is not and never will cut it!

I continuously complain that there is actually plenty of water available......we just choose to treat the waste water and then send it out to the sea and hope it comes back as rain. A permanent solution has ALWAYS been there, treat it and pump it back into dams as Class 1A water, which then only needs to be chlorinated to make it potable. The cost of doing this is a fractional increase to our water bill spread over large cities. How many pumps and pipes would $5B have bought instead of building the white elephant at Wonthagi in Victoria....add in solar and battery tech to run the pumps 24hrs a day. Water should only be discharged to the sea when dams are at capacity/before floods to avoid flooding of large areas.