Congratulations, you’ve succeeded,
you’ve acknowledged 60% of you at least
are the incredibly dense and mindless people
needed to make sense of incomprehensible
avoidance strategies on recycling water.
You may have missed the point, the vote
was not to see which political policy would
prevail; tragically it was a statement to our Nation
on re-use of the Country’s scarcest resource.
Okay, you’ve made it pretty clear,
not our problem you’ve said, go find
your solution somewhere else. Of course,
the expedient of sending the Media Tart
a message by saying ‘no’ meant
you had a win of sorts, ducked the real issue,
perhaps too intent on political innuendo
to sense the way your vote would be used.
Or perhaps you didn’t. Well, you’ve missed
the opportunity anyway, delivered a kick in
the guts of common sense, suffered a momentary
lapse of reason. I suppose it’s the season
for such stupidity. Relax in your baths tonight,
have another cup of tea, wash your cars
and hose the grass clippings off the concrete
paths. Tomorrow there will be more restrictions,
next week the price of water will rise.
These predictions are not infinite or bitter
condemnations mate, they are reflections of
the finite nature of our supply of treated water.
© I.D. Carswell
The problem with the recycled sewage plant proposed for Toowoomba is that it just would not work.
ReplyDeleteIt is not possible to produce 11,000 ML of recycled water from 8,000 ML of sewage. Toowoomba City Council also had nowhere for the RO waste stream to go. Acland Coal did not want it. Singapore pumps its RO waste stream into the sea.
The plant could never have been built for $68 million - closer to $150-200 million would be more accurate when you take into account the hundreds of acres of evaporation ponds required which were not included in the budget.
Regardless of your view on recycled water use, the no vote in Toowoomba was correct because the proposal was a dud.
John, thank you for the excellent quantitative feedback. Oddly, the ostensibly real-time data you quote was never evident (to me) during pre-polling.
ReplyDeleteI don't live in Toowoomba but I do watch news bulletins. All I ever saw was hysterical politicised rubbish, liberally spiced with misleading or patently untrue 'information' and suffering from party political overtones, and all opposed to the proposal.
Perhaps the no vote was correct for budgetry and engineering reasons, and perhaps with time and goodwill these things could be fixed, but in the meantime Toowoomba residents have cast a significant vote of no confidence in their Council.
I hope they are prepared for the next step which will necessitate fixing that problem 'toute suite'.