Water lifeline meets resistance.

I should preface this rant by telling you I was brought up in the Shoalhaven.

Sydney is in the grip of a water crisis due to the drought, so Bob Carr has come up with the master plan to sort it all out - steal someone elses water.

It's not like the drought snuck up on us, this has been an ongoing issue for a number of years. It is short-sightedness and lack of political will to spend the bucks and come up with a plan that has led us here, and it will be vision and determination that will get us out. Unfortunately Bob Carr has none of these latter qualities.

The centrepiece of the government's plan to alleviate Sydney's acute water shortage is to build two new pipelines to pump water from the Tallawa Dam in the Shoalhaven to the Avon Dam and Warragamba Dam. This will provide an extra 18% of capacity per annum to Sydney's existing reserves.

Great, this is exactly what Sydney needs - more water to squander. The implication, of course, is that while Sydney has 18% more capacity, the people of the Shoalhaven have potentially 100% less capacity once Sydney sticks the big bendy straw into Tallawa and sucks the bastard dry. Tallawa Dam is, at present, 31% full, while Warragamba is 39% full. The Shoalhaven has been under more severe water restrictions than Sydney has for a lot longer, and now we're going to take what little else they have for our own needs?

Not only that, but it ignores the larger issue of the environmental impact of sucking up the annual flood of the Shoalhaven River. When I was a kid, Tallawa wasn't built. Every year the Shoalhaven would flood and every few years there would be a monster flood that would break the banks, inundate the flood plan and put the Boatshed under water. All part of nature's cycle, etc. After Tallawa was built the annual flood could be controlled and the monster, state of emergency floods became a thing of the past. I think the last big one was 1991.

Here's the thing - after the dam was built, the fish started disappearing. The river was dying because without the flood it would silt up, nutrients from upstream didn't arrive and the salt content rose dramatically. The paper mill, feed mill, etc, didn't help by adding their pollutants which had nowhere to go now but hang around in the river. The local authorities eventually worked out what was happening and released fresh water from the dam periodically to help keep the balance. Now the river is reasonably healthy again.

This will all be a thing of the past once the pipeline takes away the rivers lifeblood again.

My point is this - increasing available capacity won't solve a damn thing, pardon the pun. what happens in 10-20 years when that extra capacity is exhausted? Sydney has to start using the water is has more efficiently and effectively. Sydneysiders need to learn that water is a precious commodity, not something that runs endlessly from the nearest tap and costs $1 per thousand litres. I'm real sorry, but maybe it should cost two or three times that much. People need to accept that we live in a country that can't afford massive, lush, green lawns. My next door neighbour needs to wake up and realise that the concrete footpath doesn't need to be watered every day.

Not only that, but Sydney Water needs to start replacing some of its leaky old iron pipes that have been around since before the harbour bridge was built. We live on the coast, so salt water is plentiful, we have abundant sunshine and plenty of onshore winds, so alternative energy sources to run desalinisation plants are viable.

Of course, the plan won't go ahead if "the Shoalhaven's rainfall ...(decreases)... due to climate change, and the pipeline will not be built until 2009." To that statement I say - Bollocks. The Shoalhaven's rainfall has been falling for a number of years and I don't think it will make one drop of difference to the government's plan. By the time it's too late, it will be someone elses problem and in someone elses back garden.