Desalination get on with it

Peter Farago
BUSINESS is leading the debate on desalination in Geelong while politicians argue about whether the public should talk about it.
Last week Labor MPs in state parliament’s Upper House, with the aid of the Greens, put the kybosh on a Liberal attempt to set up an inquiry into desalination.
While the Greens voted on philosophical grounds – the party is opposed to desalination, preferring conservation to increase the state’s water supply – Labor MPs labelled the Liberals’ inquiry “simpleminded”, politicallymotivated and “inane”.
It was the state opposition’s first attempt to use the newlook Legislative Council as a true house of review by setting up the ongoing inquiry.
And while Liberal MPs dismissed accusations their party would use the inquiry to undermine Labor’s stance on desalination, there’s no doubt Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu hoped the committee would reveal information damaging to the Government.
Labor’s Matt Viney said “select committees have been used politically and that is the intention of the opposition in this further proposal for a select committee”.
“It wants to use it as a political means to leverage up its fairly simpleminded approach to the water issue, which is to build a dam – if it does not rain it will not fill – and to build a desalination plant,” he said.
What the Liberals wanted was a select committee to hold a public inquiry into building a desalination plant to expand Melbourne’s potable water supply.
But Labor MPs said the inquiry would be a waste of time because the Government was already investigating desalination through an $18.5 million Melbourne Water feasibility study.
But Greens leader Greg Barber, while siding with the Government in blackballing the inquiry, hit the nail on the head on why the Liberals wanted the inquiry when he expressed concern about how Labor was conducting its own investigation.
“It is really open to the ALP to run an independent and totally open process on any particular proposal it is considering or, for that matter, on any live proposal being developed,” Mr Barber told parliament.
His comments came before a Melbourne newspaper report that State Government would block crossexamination of witnesses at public hearings into a supplementary environmental effects study on Port Phillip Bay channel deepening.
There are two commercial proposals to use desalinated wastewater around Geelong for agricultural, industrial and residential purposes.
These businesses have announced their intentions to the public about recycling water from Barwon Water’s Black Rock treatment plant.
Yet State Government continues to shroud its own inquiries into desalination.
What is the problem?
Desalination has both positives and negatives for the community.
State Government obviously sees positive and negatives for its own image, too.
Labor was scathing of the Liberal policy at the last election to build a desalination plant, yet it secretly began investing millions to investigate the process.
Why not go the whole way and discuss the issue in public, presenting taxpayers with all the information on how desalination can fit into securing the state’s future water supplies?