How did the SEQ crisis come to pass? Why did a government whose own Population and Forecasting Unit correctly predicted the rate of growth in Southeast Queensland allow water stocks in its dams to fall to perilously low levels while simultaneously allowing the government’s own electric power stations to continue to thrive on potable water supplies? By 2006 the power stations were using up to one-fifth of SEQ’s daily consumption of water. What an irony that at peak times in summer most of the electricity goes to air-conditioning for apartments and houses built without any attempt at cross ventilation. Surely the upper-middle class should be left to sizzle in the neo-Tuscan mansions they erect, having managed to get rid of the traditional Queenslanders on river and hillside sites. And investors in inner-city apartments should be made to live in their shoddily-designed concrete boxes after the air-conditioning has been disconnected.
The explanation of the crisis in SEQ lies in an analysis of infrastructure quick-fixes popular with civil engineers, a remarkable lack of accountability in the water bureaucracies, and untold arrogance in the electricity authorities. Local governments and the state government were so preoccupied by real-estate-driven growth that they lost interest in the quality of the urban environment. The property industry in Queensland is the largest single source of election funds for both the ALP and the coalition parties. Since the late l950s all Queensland premiers have embraced the property industry as a vital engine for growth.
Premier Bjelke Petersen fondly bragged about the cranes on the skyline. Subsequent premiers have been more subtle but the message has been the same. Premier Beattie finally delivered the first statutory plan for the SEQ region in June 2005, partly to placate growing environmental concerns about the fate of the coastal and hinterland landscape, but the real beneficiary has been the property industry, which now has oodles of infrastructure support to create higher densities in the inner suburbs and certainty about where it can bulldoze afresh to create instant ‘Lakes estates’ on the urban periphery. Fortunately some of the lakes do offer on-site stormwater management and capture.
A society so dependent on real and speculative building booms creates a haphazard urban form. Car-based suburban development, well beyond any prospect of either rail or Brisbane’s impressive and recently augmented busway system, has led to the creation of a 200 kilometre city from Noosa to the Tweed. As over 30 per cent of the population can’t drive or don’t have a car, there are a lot of youth and older adults stranded in this urban form. Successive state governments refused to contemplate the looming problem and no major political party has yet been brave enough to question the rights of an adult electorate where three-quarters of voters drive (Spearritt 2004).
Only 17 per cent of Southeast Queensland is held in state forests and national parks, compared to 43 per cent of Greater Sydney. One obvious result is that the catchment areas for dams in SEQ are not a patch on the Sydney catchment areas. Because so much of the relatively arable environment of SEQ had been carved up into small rural landholdings by the early l950s, when it came to locating new dams they ended up to the north-west of the city in a relatively dry catchment area, the Wivenhoe dam site selected as much to prevent flooding as to collect and store water. Add the worst drought in 100 years, and you’ve got a very big problem (Brisbane Institute 2003).
Even Gold Coast property developers got worried at the thought that the water might run out. Imagine the indignity of having to buy in water — via truck — from northern New South Wales to fill up your lap pool. It hardly goes with the Gold Coast’s image of sunshine, instant palm plantings and unlimited largesse, from meter maids and schoolies week to champagne at the Indy 500. The current Gold Coast marketing campaign, ‘Very GC’, brags of ‘miles of sandy beach, lush green rainforest, world-class golfing greens and world-famous theme parks’. (Verygc.com 2007)