Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Water Resources) Share this | Hansard source

Inevitably, in any desktop study you have to make a lot of assumptions, and that is what was done. The critical issues—and this is where the desktop study was very valuable—were: firstly, to examine the hydrological data to form a view about the amount of water that is actually available in any given stream, and that is critical: what is the level of regulation that could reasonably be applied to any given stream; and, secondly, to examine the cost of building the infrastructure. No sweeping generalisations are made there. Plainly, to take any project of this kind further, work involving many millions of dollars would need to be done, but of course you would have to get the support of the New South Wales government and the community, and commitment from the Queensland government. But, unless you take the first step, unless you actually put the option on the table and say, ‘There’s a piece of work. Let’s see whether we want to take this further,’ you never get off first base.

One of the problems with water planning for our big cities is that there has been a tendency to take options off the table and say: ‘No, we don’t want a new dam. We don’t like recycling because we don’t want recycled effluent finding its way into the drinking water system. We don’t like desalination because it uses too much energy.’ You take one option after another off the table and then you come back to square one and say, ‘But we’re running out of water.’ The critical thing to do with water infrastructure is to put every option on the table and promote an informed discussion. That report speaks for itself. I cannot expand on that, other than to make this observation: in terms of energy, water is very heavy. A thousand litres of water weighs exactly one tonne and it has a mass of one cubic metre. So moving water around costs a lot of money. The water industry is one of the biggest consumers of energy. But everything you do with water uses a lot of energy. Whether you are pumping it up hill and down dale, whether you are recycling it, whether you are desalinating it, you will find that every use of water is energy intensive—unless you happen to be fortunate enough to have a dam up in the hills and it can run downhill.

As far as Ballarat is concerned, we are still considering that part of the project. When we reach a decision we will advise all interested parties. I think that reaches the end of the list of questions.

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