Creating our own water crisis ...

Excerpt from an article in The Age relating to Victoria's management of its water resources:

Water crisis? We're giving the stuff away

By Cameron Houston and Liselotte Johnsson

4 November 2006

VAST quantities of the state's most precious resource — pure drinking water — will be siphoned off by a bottled water manufacturer with links to soft drink giant Coca-Cola Amatil, which will pay a paltry $2.40 per million litres for the privilege.

The charge is well below the $960 paid by Melburnians for a megalitre of tap water, or the $45 paid by farmers for the same quantity of irrigation water.

Melbourne bottling company, Sunkoshi Limited, holds a permit to extract 150 megalitres annually from an underground aquifer on private land 85 kilometres east of Melbourne.

The owners of Sunkoshi provide water from a Ballarat spring to Coca-Cola Amatil for bottling. Sunkoshi plans to build a 250-metre road on the Powelltown property that would allow six trucks to remove 150,000 litres of water each day.

The pure ground water is controlled by State Government authority Southern Rural Water and the application for an extraction permit was approved by Melbourne Water and the Department of Sustainability and Environment.

Southern Rural Water licensing manager Trevor McDevitt conceded the $2.40 charge per megalitre "could seem cheap" and said there was no direct link between the price and value of the water.

"It's a cost recovery figure that doesn't necessarily reflect the value of the water, but I'm not going to enter the politics of all of this," Mr McDevitt said.

With Victoria in the grip of a devastating eight-year drought, the Bracks Government has identified the water crisis as the state's biggest challenge. Environment Minister John Thwaites has vowed to link the price of water to its intrinsic value in an effort to promote water conservation.

But Geoff Fraser, spokesman for Water Minister John Thwaites, says Southern Rural Water makes no pricing distinction between water used for agricultural purposes or commercial purposes such as bottling.

"We have introduced a tiered pricing system in urban centres. However, in rural areas water is valued differently," Mr Fraser said. He would not elaborate on how or why rural water was valued differently.

Environment Victoria's director of healthy rivers, Dr Paul Sinclair, said he was shocked the Government would virtually give away water to be bottled by a private company.

"No politician can seriously tell us we're in a water crisis, when a million litres of water costs only $2.40," he said.

See - Water crisis?

At $2.40 for a million litres, put an order in for $100 worth of water from Victoria. That should water the Toowoomba gardens for a while ...