Table of Contents
If you flew into Brisbane in 2006 you were greeted with a huge advertising hoarding on the airport drive with the words:
‘Head to Queensland. The climate’s great for growth.’
The text was set to a backdrop of vast humanoid cranes walking across a brown landscape. The state government advertising campaign, run nationally, reminded punters of Queensland’s booming open-cut coal mines, and set the scene for a state on which the sun never sets. Demographers, senior public servants, property developers and Premier Beattie bragged that SEQ was the fastest growing area in Australia, with more than 1000 people a week moving north. Local morale was further boosted by Sydney’s ailing property market and Melbourne’s unpredictable weather.
Such optimism has long marked image-making in Queensland, ever since the northern state stole the surfing limelight from New South Wales in the l950s and 1960s. With the spectacular growth in tourist numbers in the last 40 years, Queensland put great store in its advertising slogans: ‘Beautiful one day, perfect the next’ is now one of the world’s most long-lived tourist marketing ploys. Coastal Queensland houses over one-third of all holiday-let rental apartments in Australia.
So in Queensland, the climate is good for holidaymakers, for locals and ‘for growth’, the optimum trilogy. What could go wrong? No-one ever suggested at the countless focus groups run by political parties that the cities might run out of potable water. Yet that is precisely the scenario that confronted Beattie in his last year of office, and has had water authorities, politicians and senior bureaucrats ducking for cover ever since. The ad agency that thought up the dusty imagery for ‘The climate’s great for growth’ must have known something.
While all major Australian cities have experienced periods of drought, few have been more innocent of the possibility in the last few decades than Brisbane. The l974 flood, which entered much of the CBD and all of the upriver suburbs and catchments, reinforced the notion that oversupply was the problem, not a lack of water. Over 90 per cent of the metropolitan area didn’t get water meters until the l990s — so the majority of Brisbane City Council (BCC) ratepayers simply paid an access charge for their water, not a usage charge. They had no way of knowing how much water they were using or wasting. Today, the hastily constituted Queensland Water Commission (June 2006) hands out egg-timers with a suction cap to be affixed to your bathroom wall to encourage you to shower in under four minutes. Such tactics have greatly reduced demand, and are being followed with interest around the world.
The turnaround in Southeast Queensland has been extraordinary, which is why it is such a pertinent study at present. Brisbane, from the l960s to the 1970s, went from a city where most new subdivisions were unsewered to a sewered metropolis, the ALP City Council getting a large helping hand from the Whitlam government. But, at the same time, Brisbane had more fire hydrants than water meters. In the late l980s, fewer than one in 15 houses had a water meter. No wonder per-capita consumption per day hovered around 700 litres. By 2007 — with restrictions and a well-supported public campaign — consumption had fallen to 140 litres, one of the lowest in the developed world, lower even than Israel. (See Cole l984; Courier Mail 28 August 2007.)
In the l950s, l960s and l970s, Brisbane’s water debates were dominated by occasional bans on sprinklers, the adequacy of the system of reservoirs to supply sprinkler demand, an ongoing debate about sewering more houses (most post-l950 subdivisions were septic) and from l974, the fear of flood, after Brisbane experienced its worst flood since the l890s.
The proportion of properties with water meters fell from 80 per cent in the late l930s to 6 per cent in the l980s. Installing meters to the hundreds of thousands of un-metered properties became such a political hot potato that both sides in Council promised not to install more meters. In late l984 thousands of brand-new water meters were buried at Boondall, a tip and wetlands area north-west of the airport. They await liberation by future archaeologists. Neither the dominant ALP group in Brisbane City Council (Australia’s only metropolitan-wide council) nor its opponents wanted to be seen to be measuring, let along charging individual ratepayers for the amount of water they used. Water — as much of it as any household or business wanted or needed — was seen as an inalienable right.
The policy of not bothering to install water meters, even for new subdivisions, continued until the late l980s. This changed in l989, and in the six years between l990 and l995 218 000 new water meters, in black plastic containers flush with the nature strip, were installed throughout Brisbane. Suddenly households could be informed of how much water they were actually using. But this didn’t stop the sprinklers, because water was plentiful and extraordinarily cheap, less than $1 for 1000 litres. The catchment areas and the dams, which filled from time to time with deluge rains, seemed able to keep up with demand (BCC Archives; Brisbane Statistics; Brisbane Yearbooks).