Toowoomba put it to a vote and the people said no. Goulburn is trying to figure out how to fool people into accepting it, and Peter Beattie in Brisbane just did it without giving anybody a chance to say no.
But why try to force people to accept re-cycled sewerage?
Why can't governments see that a litre of re-cycled sewerage given to industry releases a litre of fresh water for domestic use?
It is not a complicated idea. And it is feasable, because industrial users are way smaller in number and way bigger consumers than domestic users.
And this solution gets government off the political hook.
But a bigger problem with the re-cycled sewerage idea is that it won't work.
The volume of sewerage returned is considerably less than the fresh water supplied - then there is a loss on re-cycling, so on the second go round the available water is about half what it was the first round. And so on.
You don't need to be too smart to see that this won't work - new water is absolutely necessary if the supply is to be maintained.
The next problem is the bullshit - governments make much fuss about showing samples of re-cycled sewerage water from Singapore and London, saying that these advanced societies drink the stuff. Actually this is not correct - anywhere there is a choice the re-cycled stuff goes to industry.
Bottom line is that no-body drinks re-cycled sewerage if they can avoid it.
The next thing that governments mis-inform about is that sewerage is cheaper to re-cycle than desalinating seawater.
It's true if you pick the most expensive reverse osmosis option. RO is just filtration, so the more stuff there is in the water the less well it works.
But if you make the comparison using more sensible technologies then desalination is quite feasable. Remember that half the re-cycled water in the world is seawater desalinated in Arabia - how come they don't use RO?
Why can't we learn something from them? They say we are a clever country...