***qld water ***

Water supply debate needs to begin
Editorial
10nov04
THE Beattie Government seems keen to take on new challenges. Certainly the enthusiasm which it has displayed in taking up the task of planning for southeast Queensland's expected rapid growth over the next decade suggests it is ready to make hard decisions.

The first one or two of those hard decisions should have to do with water supply in the urbanised southeast. The issues about the region's water are simple enough: how to better manage demand for a dwindling resource; and how to harvest that resource more efficiently. But the answers to those questions eluded successive governments, more concerned as they were with political survival than the region's long-term future. The Government has a different political landscape with which to deal. The circumstances Premier Peter Beattie confronts are more conducive to introducing policy reforms that may carry short-term, localised political pain but will produce a benefit for the region in the longer term. In this context, water reform is taking up a lot of the Government's time and resources at the moment, and deservedly so.

The construction of Wivenhoe Dam, west of Brisbane, served to absolve governments of the responsibility for finding other sources of urban water supply and the current Government's own draft water supply strategy has noted "very little planning for the implementation of new water sources beyond the capacity of our existing water supply sources". There has been a reluctance at the highest levels of government to press ahead with creating new surface water supplies while the political risk of talking about new dams remains so high.

Then there is the demand-management side of the water debate. Compared with rural parts of the state or even some other large Australian cities, restrictions on water use in southeast Queensland are relaxed and only intermittently policed. While civic leaders cry out for a pipeline from Wivenhoe Dam, to relieve the Gold Coast's chronic undersupply of water, the region's power stations continue to use about 5 per cent of southeast Queensland's entire water supply to cool their turbines. The estimated cost of converting Tarong and Swanbank to dry cooling is $500 million. It is a high upfront bill to pay, to be sure, but one that may free up existing water resources for other purposes.

The Government is finalising the region's water-supply strategy as a first step toward tackling issues such as these. However the unanswered question will be that of guaranteeing a long-term source of water for a population that is expected to increase by at least one million over the next 20 years. Ideas such as pipelines to the Gold Coast need to be fully tested and their limitations acknowledged. Water sources can be used more efficiently, and demand for water can be curtailed – by as much as 25 per cent for individual households, according to the new regional plan. But new sources will have to be found. What to do?