WATER WASTERS should get practical

$11 billion was spent constructing a  recycled water pipeline. Nine months after the LNP won power, it is still stuffing around, fiddling with bureaucracy and name changes.  Public servants look for trinkets from China to help people feel good that there are water entities on the job. (Magnets, drink bottles, shower timers, pencil sharpeners, backpacks ... )


The LNP has a government department charged with managing water but is dreaming up another show off agency to manage water supplies.  More stunts, logos, fancy signage, offices, cars but still no access to reasonably priced waste water. 
Refusal of the LNP, while in training, to object to outrageous waste was slack. Still having no plan in place to deal with the waste is a disgrace. Establishing a Water Commission to do what government departments should have been doing continues to waste at least $25 million a year. The confusion between multiple departments adds more to those costs.
Waste water and sewage from Ipswich and Brisbane is released into rivers with some sent to Gibson Island at the Mouth of the Brisbane River. Some of that water is treated to drinking standard and sent to the Power Station at Bundamba. An 80 km round journey with the only benefit is more expensive power bills. The price of the water is ridiculously expensive which impacts on our power bills.
The government forces the power station to use the expensive water as a subtle tax on the people. 

The pipeline passes hundreds of schools, parks, forests, industrial locations, catchments where it could be used productively. Millions of litres of water has been wasted since the pipeline went live. Dams are supposedly full so they don't want any extra water.

Brisbane and Ipswich City council don't want it. Industry does not want it. It costs too much. The water does not need to be treated to such a high standard. It should be released to help nurture and protect massive areas along the pipeline. Check out the parched conditions, filthy streets, dying trees while there is so much expensive water sitting in the dams. Water should be used from the pipeline to protect the environment, nurture the catchments, recharge underground water supplies. 

Minister, Mark McArdle, needs to get busy. The LNP must have had a plan in place before the pipeline was constructed. After 9 months he has not apologised to industries and irrigators that rejected such high priced water. 
The LNP shold never preside over spending billions  without thinking through the plans to meet various scenarios. The Water Commission with its trinkets and stunts but no practical action should have been closed down as a priority. 

John Howard gifted $400 million to give Queensland 'climate resilience.' Pity he didn't have strings attached - insist dams get cleaned out while they were empty or to have plans in place how the recycled water could be used once rain came.  The LNP traumatised caravan park residents with a proposal to sell land that may benefit construction of a Golf Course, one example of clumsy badwill in attempting recover the Queensland economy.

 
LNP BIG fat water wasters ...
Draft in progress ...  7 November 2012
One beneficiary of the hugely expensive project ready to go into mothballs ....
http://trenchless-australasia.com/news/australias_largest_water_recycling_project_nears_completion/000821/