MEDIA RELEASE

A performance report released last Friday (3rd April 2009) by the Parliamentary Secretary for Water indicates that, despite Australia’s water utilities increasing capital expenditure by around 80% over the last three financial years, the volume of water recovered by recycling in that same period increased by only 30%, and by a paltry 6% in 07-08 in comparison to the preceding financial year.

Irrespective of reduced national consumption as a result of the current water crisis, Fair Water Use believes that this is a dismal effort which suggests that, despite all the rhetoric, government water authorities are more committed to increasing consumption as opposed to promoting efficiency of use.

Current figures indicate that a mere 13% of waste-water treated by national utilities is subjected to any form of recycling, the majority of the remainder being discarded into our coastal waters together with significant concentrations of pollutants and toxins. 

Meanwhile, governments both state and federal have been totally seduced by grandiose capital works which will either divert ever-increasing volumes of this nation’s most valuable natural resource from rapidly-depleting natural stocks or produce insignificant amounts of “new” water by the untenably costly and energy-inefficient process of desalination, a technology which most independent experts believe will wreak havoc on vital coastal ecosystems.

How long will Australians continue to allow our elected representatives to sacrifice our national water security at the altar of political expediency as part of their unquestioning and blind devotion to the gods of consumption and privatisation?