With NSW declared 100% in drought:
And Sydney’s water storages plunging:
The handwringing continues by the so-called ‘experts’:
“We’re sleepwalking,” says Ian Wright, a senior lecturer at Western Sydney University who was part of the 2016 triennial audit of the Sydney Water Drinking Catchment. “When you lose 25 per cent of your total water storage in 12 months – wow, that’s a really steep fall.”
Dr Wright and others say the government wound back programs that had encouraged people to conserve water, and delayed recycling projects. If those efforts were stepped up, water storage levels, which are now at about two-thirds, won’t fall so fast…
Residential customers, now paying on average $94 a year to cover the fixed costs of the desalination plant, won’t be amused to cop curbs on water use too…
Justin Field, the Greens water spokesman, said there was a case for early imposition of water restrictions, noting per capita water use has been rising since the Liberal-National government took over in 2011…
Also pushing up water use is Sydney’s rising population, increasing at the pace of about 1 million people every 10 years. That pace is expected to continue for decades.
The fact is that Sydney has added nearly one million people in only the past 13-years and the city’s population is projected to balloon by another 1.73 million people over the next 20-years alone on the back of mass immigration, at the same time as droughts become more common because of climate change:
This means that Sydney’s water shortages will inevitably worsen, irrespective of the imposition of water restrictions.
Moreover, around one million of this projected population growth is expected to occur in Sydney’s West, whose water supply is already buckling:
Documents obtained by The Daily Telegraph can reveal WaterNSW and Sydney Water have voiced concerns that Sydney’s urban sprawl and booming population are putting increasing pressure on the water system, and steps need to be urgently taken to ensure Sydney is not hit by a water shortage.
WaterNSW has also revealed that housing developments built too close to pipelines and canals in Western Sydney have “already resulted in impacts to the water quality”. “Increasing urbanisation, particularly in western and southwestern Sydney, have resulted in increased pressure on the integrity of critical water supply infrastructure, namely the Warragamba Pipeline and the Upper Canal,” the documents state…
WaterNSW says that housing and land developments need to start considering the impact building is having on water supply. It is investigating “water augmentation strategies” to service the booming population…
Water scarcity is the elephant in the room of the population debate, and an issue Australia’s mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ boosters continually ignore.
The first best policy reponse to alleviating Sydney’s water woes is to not make the situation worse by force-feeding many tens-of-thousands of new migrants into Greater Sydney each year. It’s bleedingly obvious.
