Has Toowoomba already voted NO?

As most readers would be aware, South East Queensland will vote in March on the question of whether to supplement drinking water sources with recycled water. Or as Premier Beattie put it today:

"This (question) basically is: 'Are you or are you not in favour of drinking purified recycled water to a standard that's accepted by health officials around the world'"

Nineteen Shires are to vote, including Toowoomba since that city is considering the possibility of extracting future supplies from Wivenhoe Dam. But ‘hold on’, you say! Didn’t Toowoomba vote no to the same question only five months ago?

I don’t believe they did. I watched that debate fairly closely and was assured by many of the ‘No’ campaigners that there were specific issues associated with the Toowoomba proposal that motivated them to vote no. Here’s how Cr Snow Manners put it three days after the poll:

Posted by Snow Manners of Toowoomba on Tue 01 Aug 06 at 03:58pm
"The Toowoomba debate was not about drinking recycled water. It was about a community considering it options, dam water, bore water, rainwater or sewage water. Sewage water was not the preferred option (apparently). The other options are now being more closely examined. People of Toowoomba also expressed concern that they were never given the opportunity to provide inputs to Council about their preferred options. Toowoomba has a very high proportion of tertiary educated people in the community by virtue of being a city of 100,000 people with a major University and a host of highly respected private schools serving western Queensland and also by virtue of having major corporate offices and government headquarters serving that huge region as well as being a centre for medical specialists serving the region. Other trade professionals and ordinary folk are not ill informed either. As a chosen retirement destination for farmers and graziers there are a lot of practical people in the city. Toowoomba’s choice was an educated and intelligent decision about options not a potable reuse debate."

Another “No” campaigner, “John C” left variations of the following two messages on numerous websites and blogs in the days following following the poll:

John C Says: August 20th, 2006 at 2:17 pm
"The problem with the recycled sewage plant proposed for Toowoomba is that it just would not work. It is not possible to produce 11,000 ML of recycled water from 8,000 ML of sewage. Toowoomba City Council also had nowhere for the RO waste stream to go. Acland Coal did not want it. Singapore pumps its RO waste stream into the sea. The plant could never have been built for $68 million - closer to $150-200 million would be more accurate when you take into account the hundreds of acres of evaporation ponds required which were not included in the budget. Regardless of your view on recycled water use, the No vote in Toowoomba was correct because the proposal was a dud".

John c says: July 31st, 2006 at 11:06 pm
"Many people in Toowoomba voted No, not because of any scare tactics, but because they had read the Council’s NWC funding application that Mayor Thorley tried to keep secret. This document showed the project as being fundamentally flawed. The Water Futures project was never a solution - where was the RO waste stream going to go. Where was Thorley going to hide it? Acland Coal didn’t want it. Without their involvement, the project’s cost doubled. How high would rates be then? You will be surprised at how quickly other water source options are now adopted for Toowoomba".

In addition to the issues raised by Cr Manners and “John C”, many people expressed concern about the loss of the water that currently flows from the Wetalla Sewage Treatment Plant, eventually into Oakey Creek and the Condamine River. This water is a recognised valuable resource to irrigators in the region and the loss of that water may have caused considerable hardship in these times of severe drought. Finally, there was widespread concern that the Toowoomba scheme would not solve current water shortages since it would not be online for a number of years.

Of course, all of these people will realise that any proposal involving recycled water from Luggage Point to Wivenhoe Dam will be quite a different proposal. Only those who voted according to some ideological opposition or support for (planned) potable recycling would suggest that their vote for Toowoomba is automatically transferable to the proposed South East Queensland Scheme.

People would not have raised the above issues if these did not significantly contribute to the decisions that they ultimately made.

Don’t you reckon?