|
January 30, 2010
The 7.30 Report on the ABC has been running a series on the population population debate last week. This series steps beyond the political rhetoric of a greater Australia to:
take a look at how an increased population is likely to reshape Australia, where it will be accommodated, how government will cope with the pressures on all those fundamentals like jobs, transport, housing, food, energy and water, health and education, and how we're going to maintain social cohesion through the next wave of immigration.
Living in Adelaide, which is slowly becoming hotter and drier, makes me very aware that water is a key issue. Water isn't getting any more plentiful. It's not just our lakes, rivers and wetlands that will be effected. Australia's cheap coal-fired power generators, for instance, will be hard-hit by water shortages as they driven by steam and cooled by water. 20 per cent of our water supply goes to cool coal-fired power plants to produce electricity. So if you want to save water, make the shift to renewable energy.
Secondly, a region's population and economic growth is limited by water-- a strong possibility for the south-east corner of Queensland and Canberra. So how do you ensure our cities are running sustainably? Water recycling from the shower, the bath and the laundry for households; storm water retention and recycling for cities; recycling treated sewerage for businesses and landscapes.
Water is a symptom of the sustainability issue. Sustainability means sustainable cities since, as Brendan Gleeson pointed out, Australia is a nation of cities and suburbs. Tim Flannery, in the same forum, observes:
Every time I fly into Melbourne, I see those suburbs just expanding out into the countryside. And they've all got lovely green lawns, those houses, all of their swimming pools are full. You look over the other side to the farmland, the grass is dead, the farm damns are empty and you can see what's happening, that this unsustainable model is just growing and growing and growing in the cities and we're not doing the job that we need to do in terms of constraining it.
Gleeson says that we haven't been very good at recognising that our cities are a central feature of our national life.
But I think it's important that we put cities and their health or otherwise at the centre of this discussion, because the large majority of the population growth is gonna occur in our cities, so how well are they faring? How well are they suited to providing the base for another surge in population growth?
His answer is that if you look at our cities in terms of water, energy, transport, we've reached some really critical thresholds in our cities where we've got some serious dysfunction. He adds:
I think the biggest problem that we have is a governance deficit for cities. .... And for a variety of reasons, the state governments have not proved to be adept managers of our metropolitan areas. And we can go into a whole lot of incidences where they have mismanaged, in my view, our cities. The record of that management of the cities has been a very episodic and in many ways amateurish one.
Bernard Salt points out that our cities work at the moment where you can commute from the city edge to the city centre, where petrol is $1.25 a litre. At some point over the next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years that might be $5 a litre and the entire CBD-suburban industrial model breaks down.
|
|
This is Kevin Rudd speaking on the 7.30 Report on the water issue for Adelaide:
Desal plants solve everything. No mention of desal plants being powered by electricity produced by coal fired stations!