Category: Water

Water industry set to repeat Telstra’s mistakes

admin /20 November, 2010

The current kerfuffle about the separation of the infrastructure and retail services in Telstra is a timely warning for energy and water privatisation programs.

In 1994, Stewart Fist and myself – writing as Geoff Ebbs – both had weekly columns in the Australian newspaper and called for that separation as a fundamental plank in any telecommunications strategy. We were considered radical ratbags and dismissed as having no real grasp of the economics of major infrastructure corporations. (Other ratbag ideas that I promoted at the time include resource taxes, social networking and timeshifted media.) Some of Stewart’s columns are still on line at http://www.abc.net.au/http/sfist/

Five myths about the Murray Darling Basin Plan

admin /27 October, 2010

The debate about the Murray Darling Basin has become a political football with a level of hysteria that is driven by a largely ignorant media. These five false beliefs about the basin and water allocation have been promoted by people with vested interests to confuse the media and skew the debate. If everyone talking to the media takes the time to explain why these lies are not to be repeated the debate will gradually shift to more moderate and constructive ground.

Water Minister tries to shoot the messenger

admin /17 September, 2010

Water Minister tries to shoot the messenger
 
“They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth.” – Plato
 
Media Release: 17 September 2010
 
NSW Water Minister Phil Costa attempted to disguise his inability to defend the indefensible Tillegra Dam by launching an extraordinary attack on the project’s opponents, according to Greens NSW MP John Kaye. (‘Concerns flow over Tillegra Dam’ Newcastle Herald 17 September 2010, http://bit.ly/nh100917)

Henry lashes nation’s ‘disgraceful’ record on water

admin /31 March, 2010

Henry lashes nation’s ‘disgraceful’ record on water

MARK METHERELL AND KIRSTY NEEDHAM

March 29, 2010

AUSTRALIA’S record on water management has been a disgrace, the secretary of the Treasury, Ken Henry, has declared in a scathing critique of the nation’s environmental bungles.

Dr Henry said people refused to learn from the loss of scores of species, water resources and hardwood forests, ”reflecting our hard-wired susceptibility to making irrational … judgments”.

”Water management on this driest inhabited continent on Earth has been a disgrace,” Dr Henry told a forum staged by the Weereewa Festival based at Lake George near Canberra. He is the festival’s patron.

This was even though water had been the subject of extensive research and debate. ”It is on everybody’s radar.”

His comments came as the Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce said a referendum on a federal takeover of the Murray-Darling Basin, pledged by the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, might not be needed.

Senator Joyce, now the Opposition’s spokesman on water, infrastructure and regional development, said that if agreement could be reached, ”then we don’t need a referendum”.

Brazil to build world’s third larest dam in Amazon

admin /3 February, 2010

Brazil to build world’s third largest dam in Amazon

Ecologist

2nd February, 2010

Environmental groups say the Belo Monte dam project would devastate a large area of the Amazon rainforest and threaten the survival of indigenous peoples

Brazil has given the go-ahead for the construction of the world’s third largest hydroelectric dam in the Amazon rainforest.

The roads, pipelines and power grids supporting the development will make it the biggest construction project in the Amazon since the Trans-Amazonian Highway was built in the 1970s.

Brazil’s environment minister Carlos Minc has said the $17 billion project, due to begin construction in late 2010, would have a generating capacity of 11,000 megawatts – huge, but still smaller than the world’s largest hydroelectric project, the 18,000 megawatt Three Gorges Dam in China.

Food bowl faces stark future

admin /8 September, 2009

Last month, conservative and conservation-minded politicians voted down the Victorian Labor Government’s proposal to assign bulk water entitlements from the Goulburn River to the City of Melbourne. Giovanni Ebono provides the background.

Australia’s water supply is in crisis.

Governments are spending billions on desalination plants, recycling systems and irrigation infrastructure in an attempt to supply water to cities. In the meantime, farmers are being paid to leave the land, leaving once-thriving towns without an income or a future. At the same time the river system is dying.
The Murray River no longer reaches the sea and is rapidly drying out from the mouth up.

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