Lies, damn lies and recycled water ...

In view of Mayor Thorley's intention to continue spruiking for the recycled water industry, this article is worth revisiting.

From Nine News (emphasis added):

31 July 2006

Lies, damn lies and recycled water

By Alex Smith, National Nine News, Brisbane Reporter

The Toowoomba community's resounding no vote in Saturday's water referendum had virtually nothing to do with recycling. The people simply delivered the Mayor that age-old lesson that arrogance will never attract popular support.

Mayor Di Thorley lost her bid to use recycled effluent as drinking water the day she chose to announce her plans on a national radio program, shunning her local community and leaving people with festering feelings of resentment and the perception they were being railroaded.

Thorley acted as if on some mission from God to achieve a place in environmental history as the champion of recycled water. Instead, her patronising and belittling approach has set the cause back several years.

The cause was further crippled by a professionally pathetic local media that was intimidated by the Mayor and failed to constructively canvas both sides of the debate.

It is yet another reminder to leaders at all levels of government that they can't attempt to jam something down their community's neck without meaningful negotiation and inclusion.

It's also a lesson to the Greens, Australian Water Association and other so-called conservation groups that they can't ride into town on some sort of pompous lecture tour and expect anyone to take them seriously. As they retreat to their capital city offices and gaze into their chardonnays, they would do well to reflect that ordinary Australians will not be patronised or forced to comply with environmentally trendy notions conceived in some popular café.

It is indicative of the nature of the campaign that the Australian Water Association chose to complain about the word sewage being used in conjunction with the term, recycled water. What a joke! If the lobby is so bereft of arguments to support recycling that they need to hide the water's origin, then what hope have they got of winning an honest debate.

There is another myth being perpetrated after the Toowoomba poll. The no vote was not against recycling. It was simply a 'no' to the Mayor's proposal that drinking recycled water should be the first option.

The 'no' case wants recycling, they enthusiastically want to build the reverse osmosis plant at Toowoomba's treatment plant, but they believe every litre of recycled water can be allocated to industry and other users without the need to drink it.

The 'no' case also believes that if the drought continues and there are no remaining options for supply, then treated effluent should be used for human consumption provided all current concerns about hormone and chemical contamination are overcome. The 'no' lobby in Toowoomba simply objects to the notion that recycled water has to be drunk in order for it to be environmentally correct.

The final analysis of the Toowoomba poll is that there should never have been a need for a vote. A measured proposal, properly placed before the community, would never have attracted the federal requirement for a vote.

The real tragedy now is that environmental groups and the petulant Mayor are saying the Toowoomba vote has killed recycling. Nothing is further from the truth. The vote simply means that governments at all levels have to implement recycling according to the will of the people and not in response to the whims of the environmentally correct.

See - Lies, damned lies and recycled water.