The Age
Kate Shaw
Australians have not woken up to the fact they live in a dry place.
IT IS good news that the Bracks Government is considering industrial recycled-water schemes. Lack of water is one of the stronger arguments against population increase in Australia, and before it is enlisted once again in the battle against Melbourne's metropolitan strategic plan, 2030, we need to remember two things.
First, water is an infinitely recyclable resource. Second, water consumption in Australia is utterly profligate on every level: agricultural, industrial, institutional, commercial and individual. Agricultural practices such as open irrigation channels and rice farming in Australia's south-east are by far the biggest drain, and these are rightly the subject of most government and environmentalist pressure for reform. But this hasn't stopped the sprinklers in the Murray River wine districts shooting massive jets of water into the hot northerly winds. About 10 per cent of that water makes it to those vines.
Now we are hearing about the hundreds of billions of litres of drinking water used each year to cool our power stations, after the scandal of Transurban keeping the CityLink tunnel afloat with tap water. These events are the tip of an iceberg, of course, and I think they represent a deeper attitude in Australia to water use that seems even harder to change.
This attitude is most evident in the city. You can't blame rural people for their annoyance at the way city people use water. While nearly 80 per cent of Australia's water is used in rural activities, the vast amount of that is for irrigation. People in the bush are pretty careful in their domestic consumption practices.
We can't say the same closer to where I work: responsibility for a steady stream of water flowing down Swanston Street outside the University of Melbourne was passed from the university's maintenance people to the City of Melbourne, to City West Water, to one of the university colleges and then to the Metropolitan Fire Brigade before it was fixed two years later.
My own faculty building has those old-fashioned toilets with the hugely generous flushes on the top floors. Periodically one of them gets stuck. A good whack on the back plate usually sorts them out, but I wonder how long they've been pouring away when I walk in. On one of these occasions I found a painter washing his brushes in the sink (demarcation on gender lines was clearly not a problem for him). When I asked him why he didn't try to stop the gushing water in the cubicle behind him, he said, "I'm a painter not a plumber." Where's the sense of collective responsibility here?
How many times have you walked into a restaurant, theatre, cinema, gym, government office bathroom to find dysfunctional flushes and running taps?
Too often building sites with water pouring into stormwater drains, broken mains pipes and fire hydrants spurting their contents into the street are left for hours. People who water their driveways are still not fined. Why are we using drinking water to water our gardens and flush our toilets anyway?
The joke in London about the water being passed six times might be overstating things a little, but the water has certainly been around, and Londoners still drink it.
Recycling processes in Europe are sophisticated and commonplace. Most importantly, attitudes to water in Europe are completely different. European cities are densely populated, people understand the limitations of their resources, and they share.
The water pressure in European homes is half what we are accustomed to in Australian cities. It is common to find hotel showers with push button water release (and after a while you find it's not that bad to soap your body or shampoo your hair with the water off).
Water is treated as a precious resource, and it is everyone's responsibility.
There are certainly questions about how and where an increase in population should be accommodated, and Melbourne 2030 does not yet answer them satisfactorily. But they can be resolved with good management, planning and design. Water supply is equally manageable.
Agricultural and industrial water consumers are under the pump and recycled water will become more common. Institutional, commercial and urban domestic users, however,
have a long way to go in their understanding of what it means to conserve water.
Until we address our own consumption practices and attitudes we really can't be taken seriously with regard to our incapacity to take in more people.
We will be viewed, as we increasingly are by the rest of the world, as a fat white Aussie standing in our driveway with the hose on full bore, saying to the skinny brown refugee: "Sorry mate, can't come in, not enough water."
Kate Shaw is a research fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne.
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