Bob Carr plays politics with water

SYDNEY'S water supply is now at perilously low levels but a plan which has the potential to ease the risk has been endangered by former NSW premier Bob Carr's reluctance to give up politics.

In a scathing political attack on the Federal Parliamentary Secretary for Water Malcolm Turnbull in The Bulletin magazine of October 10, 2006, Carr poured scorn on a proposal to harvest water from the Botany aquifer which runs from Centennial Park to Botany Bay. Derisively, he noted: "On September 27, Turnbull wrote to the NSW Government proposing harvesting water from the Botany aquifer, which honeycombs part of Sydney stretching from the shores of Botany Bay to the CBD boundaries and the eastern beaches. "The concept is to extract drinking water and recharge the soil with treated stormwater. "But a seasoned politician would recognise an environmentally unsaleable proposition stalking you at 50 paces, especially if – like this one – it raises the fear of subsidence for thousands of dwellings into those sandy soils and arsenic contamination from old industrial sites. At least a decade of contention in that one. Planning approval for a uranium enrichment plant in a nature reserve might be faster." An interesting point of view, given added weight by its author's role as the former premier, but on December 14, 2006, Carr was telling the NSW Minister for Water Utilities David Campbell that the State Government should not place too much weight on his remarks and that any project to tap the aquifer should be assessed independently. The rapid about-face was forced by the fact that, unbeknown to Carr when he was penning his splenetic political attack on arch ALP foe Turnbull, a small group of his colleagues at his new employer, Macquarie Bank, was quietly preparing a submission to the NSW Government based on a proposition developed by United Utilities' Pure Botany Water Consortium, similar to that outlined in the Turnbull proposal. Under the plan, only water from the northern zone of the aquifer, which is estimated to hold some 72 gigalitres of water, or just over a half of the estimated total of 160 gigalitres, would be tapped. This would deliver an increase of at least 3-5 per cent to Sydney's aggregate supply at a lower cost per mega- litre than any of the current recycling or ground water extension projects. It has the added attraction of being recharged through the various parks and stormwater channels in the area and is located in geologically stable strata, unlike that of the Kangaloon aquifer which State Planning Minister Frank Sartor currently proposes to fast-track to harvest. It is also conveniently located and a new water treatment plant would require a minimum of new infrastructure to connect it to the mains. While Carr had absolutely no idea that Macquarie Bank had an interest in testing the viability of the plan he was attacking in his party political savaging of Turnbull, it would appear that he did seek assistance from State Government bureaucrats in preparing to launch his torpedo. Those same bureaucrats may now be involved in assessing the plan that Carr and his MacBank colleagues have put to Campbell and will presumably have to ignore the information they provided and/or do more research and form an independent opinion free of the political bias displayed by Carr in his Bulletin article. Carr, too, on his return from overseas next week, must do more to unscramble this unseemly mess he has created. Whatever the State Government's highly-paid media mouthpieces say in defence of their mediocre ministers, Sydney's water supply has not only been neglected, it has been discriminated against. Carr blocked the planned further development of the additional features which would have supplemented the Warragamba dam catchment on environmental grounds. The people of Sydney are now paying the cost of his pandering to the Greens. Tapping the northern sector of the Botany aquifer would diversify Sydney's water sources at a minimal cost, particularly when compared with the expense of the Government's favoured power-hungry Kurnell desalination project or tapping into the unstable Kangaloon aquifer. Macquarie Bank's involvement at this stage is limited to an offer to finance the next round of preliminary investigations into the viability of the aquifer project but it has not offered to build the plant if it were to proceed. (MacBank may be a big player in Australia but it remains a small fish in the global pool. Even in NSW, it has lost the last 10 bids it has submitted for private public partnership projects.) What is needed is more hydrological work and less gamesmanship. Exactly how much water can be safely extracted from the northern end of the Botany aquifer needs to be determined. Then the rate of recharging the aquifer needs to be assessed. Anyone who watches Sydney's rainfall patterns knows rain falling on the coast runs wastefully out to sea through the stormwater drains. More of it could be diverted into the aquifers, perhaps even treated wastewater could be fed in, and the aquifers recharged. What is clear is that we've got to stop playing politics with water and approach the issue with commonsense – in a businesslike manner. There is no place for Carr's carping political attacks, or those of any other former politicians, in such important matters.