In l994 the Albert Shire Council and the Gold Coast City Council (they were amalgamated the following year) produced a 14-page glossy brochure entitled Water…Lifeline of a City, replete with photographs of the Hinze Dam wall, a natural waterfall, sprinklers on golf courses, and the obligatory swim-suited woman lolling on a red flotation device in a pool. As with most such brochures, there was a brief explanation of the water cycle and of Australia as the driest inhabited continent, before readers were informed that a reliable water supply is ‘vital’ for ‘the nation’s most popular holiday region’. The little Nerang Dam and the augmentable Hinze Dam (about to have its wall raised for the third time) were said to provide for the needs ‘well into the next century’.

The brochure also devoted quite a few pages to saving water. With 60 per cent of water used inside their homes, householders were advised not to use their toilet bowl as a bin or ashtray; take shorter showers; and check their taps for leaks. The 40 per cent of water used on the garden could be reduced by soaking, not spraying; using mulch; adding a timer to the sprinkler system; letting the lawn go brown in summer; and installing a swimming pool cover. They were even shown how to read their water meter.

Because the Gold Coast has a higher average rainfall than Brisbane, the Hinze Dam fills quickly, but because it is a small dam it also empties quickly. The Gold Coast continued to draw water from Wivenhoe, but once levels fell below 30 per cent the Gold Coast looked like it would be hung out to dry, to use a technical engineering term. The Goss Labor government, having abandoned the proposal to build the Wolfendene dam in the early l990s, had not left the Gold Coast with a conventional legacy of large urban dams. With a population of 500 000, and more real-estate spruikers per head than anywhere else in Australia, investors got worried, as did their backers, banks and the superannuation funds.

By early 2005 the Gold Coast was well on the way to the strictest water restrictions in its history. Lord Mayor Ron Clarke announced in April that Southeast Queensland needed at least six mini-desalination plants, but a Brisbane City Council spokesman pointed out that using recycled water at Swanbank power station would save as much potable water as one of Clarke’s projected plants. By September 2005 Clarke was pushing heavily for a fast-tracked desal plant, allegedly necessary because the coast’s population would increase from 500 000 to 1.2 million within 50 years. The Gold Coast Council decided to bankroll a $165 million desalination plant to create a ‘bulk water source’, ‘regardless of the drought’. As part of the water grid, the state government agreed in June 2006 to partner with the Gold Coast City Council and in November that year they formed a 50–50 joint venture company to develop and own the desalination plant, to be built on council land to the immediate west of the Gold Coast airport. This plant would have a capacity of 125MLs per day. The promotional video for the site, with its intake off Tugun beach, describes the project as ‘environmentally sound and sustainable’ while admitting that the desal water will be ‘so free of salt and minerals’ that ‘minerals will have to be added’ for potable consumption (Courier Mail, 27 April 2005; Gold Coast Bulletin, 24 September 2005; 26 November 2005. See also www.desalinfo.com.au, including the project’s Community Newsletter 2007).

A bold and well-prepared state government and a similarly well-informed Gold Coast City Council could have implemented a serious water-tank initiative three years ago, retaining reticulated potable water supplies for kitchen and bathroom. The 150 000 dwellings on the Gold Coast that could be fitted with 20 000 litre capacity (gardens to be watered from laundry greywater) could have been undertaken for a maximum cost of $750 million over that period, including the cost of a pump and plumbing in for toilet and laundry use. This is calculated on a generous basis, with mass-purchase discounts of $5000 per dwelling. Instead, we get the desal plant at $1.2 billion, not counting the operating costs, let alone the carbon emissions. The Gold Coast desal plant is a knee-jerk instant fix. It proceeded without any environmental impact statement. Beattie told one protestor: ‘If we don’t have desal, we’re not going to have any water. If you don’t have water, you’re dead.’ Such insights appear to be propelling Labor premiers everywhere to embrace desal, which has almost become a plank of ALP platforms. (See Cooley et al. 2006; Courier Mail, 1 February 2007; Warren 2007.)

A really substantial water-tank initiative would have the added advantage that the thousands of sub-contractors on the Gold Coast currently employed in installing swimming pools, spa baths and Grecian bathrooms could be doing something environmentally useful. If you think I’m exaggerating you might like to contemplate Jade, a brand-new, one-apartment-per-floor block, near Q1 which is the world’s tallest residential tower, explicitly planned as such, with a commercial observation deck. In Jade, which is right on the beachfront, every individual apartment has its own lap pool, saving its occupants the 30 seconds it would take to walk to the surf. One has to wonder about any society that embraces such conspicuous, privatised opulence, beyond anything imagined by the Romans in their baths.

The army of consultants, including many our of leading engineering firms, hired to justify the new infrastructure developments in SEQ specialise in going into enormous and lucrative detail about mitigating environmental impacts, and dismiss in just a couple of pages the prospect of much more extensive use of water tanks. Two pages is all that Sinclair Knight Merz devote to water tanks in their 1600-page justification of the Traveston Crossing Dam on the Mary River near Gympie. The consultants point to energy costs for pumping tank water, but don’t compare that to costs for pumping the reticulated and recycled supply and fail to point out that gravity feed will be sufficient for some household tanks, depending on their location and the lay of the land. They are concerned about tanks getting contaminated, but there is no mention of the filtering systems now readily available. They are particularly concerned about tanks in a ‘reduced rainfall scenario’, an absurd comment when one reflects that the Sunshine Coast, Brisbane and the Gold Coast all have much higher rainfalls than the Wivenhoe catchment (Sinclair, Knight, Merz 2007).

Perth’s desal plant opened in the southern suburb of Kwinana in November 2006. The WA Premier proudly proclaimed that Perth, in ‘harnessing water from the ocean’, had acquired ‘an abundant source of drinking water that is not dependent on rainfall’. Although it will supply 17 per cent of the city’s needs, if potable water in Perth were used only for the kitchen and bathroom it would not be needed at all. Perth’s residents had been warned by George Seddon in his l970 book Swan River Landscapes that they needed to ‘fear the hose’ and create gardens suitable for the landscape and the climate. The WA government cleverly side-stepped carbon emission criticisms by drawing electricity for the plant from the Emu Downs wind farm 200 kilometres north of Perth. This is sheer sophistry, as the power generated could equally be used for other needs. (For Perth’s plant see www.watercorporation.com.au)

Resorting to desalination plants constitutes one of the great public policy failures of our times. Labor governments in Queensland, NSW, Victoria and WA, increasingly keen to prove how pro-business they are by placating their property industry lobbies, have gone down the track of desal plants with remarkably little analysis about the longer-term implications for both demand management and environmental costs. The freeway systems of the l960s to the l990s received much more internal government and public scrutiny than the desal plants have. One well-placed energy analyst has calculated that the proposed Sydney desal plant is the equivalent of adding 220 000 cars to Sydney’s roads each year (Australia Institute 2005).

In embracing its desal plant, the Gold Coast City Council can now proudly claim to be Australia’s least sustainable major city. With less than 2 per cent of its travel by public transport, its heavy reliance on air-conditioning and its desal plant, residents of the Gold Coast will shortly produce more carbon emissions per head than any other major Australian city. What a great claim for Australia’s surfing holiday capital. How will the spin doctors respond? Perhaps their next advertising campaign will be about the Gold Coast being less environmentally conscious than Dubai.

All this is the more extraordinary because both the Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast have regular and quite healthy rainfalls, with the potential for householders to capture rainwater and for councils to harvest at least some stormwater. The Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast received so much rain in January and February 2008 that every tank could have been filled and refilled within days. Such are the ironies of knee-jerk and alarmist infrastructure developments which do not adequately address alternative options. In going down the high-capital, high-energy and high-carbon emissions road, Queensland has now committed a generation to paying through the nose for a desal quick-fix rather than confronting more-sustainable approaches to climate change.