Sydney Services recycled water plans bite the dust ...

Excerpt from Brisbane Times:

1 March 2008

Or consider water planning. For years the Government was hounded by a private company named Sydney Services, which wanted to buy a lot of the city's waste water and recycle it. Naturally the Government did everything it could to resist this ridiculous proposition, but it was finally forced by the (federal) courts to enter into negotiations with Sydney Services. So what did it do? Why, it announced it would build a massive desalination plant, which would flood the market with highly subsidised water - and make large-scale recycling uncommercial.

This took Sydney Services completely by surprise. The company had been foolish enough to believe the Government's Metropolitan Water Plan, which said a desal plant would not be built unless dam levels fell below 30 per cent. It had guessed - correctly - that water levels would not fall this low.

Sydney Services may well have interpreted the decision to build a desal plant as an indication the Government would do anything it took to destroy the company. It closed down, thereby ending the terrible threat that Sydney might recycle a substantial proportion of its waste water.
It was a splendid victory, for pollution, monopoly and the $100 million-plus dividend the Government takes from Sydney Water each year. But not, you'd have to say, for our faith in government planning as represented by the Metropolitan Water Plan.

See - Sydney Services plans fail.