We are losing our extraordinary natural endowment to the spread of housing and infrastructure into agricultural land, inevitably accompanied by the expanding footprint of food and exotic fiber production into marginal lands and remaining natural habitat.

This is largely driven by population growth in an economy which must provide secondary and tertiary employment and extractive industry to support a people too numerous to nourish themselves directly from the land. Much of that population growth is driven to service a globalised real estate investment industry, dominated by print media (Murdoch & Fairfax property dot coms) with massive interests in the global marketing of property. With every year the dependence of the wealthy on landed assets at the expense of increasing numbers of land-less, increases. This malignant industry depends on population growth in Australia to keep up demand for housing, materials and related financial services. Satisfying that artificially generated demand relies on the British originated land-use planning system which puts financially profitable land-transactions above every social and ecological value. The US system is similar. Australia needs to change to Western continental Europe’s Napoleonic system, which is more protective of social rights and does not easily re-zone for profit.

Sheila Newman
Population, Land-tenure and environment sociologist

The therefore should also euthanase all their carnivorous pets .
And before you think this is a joke at one time PAL ( the canned dog food ) was the single most often purchased grocery item in the world.
Empty the pools , urine soaked natives in our scrub gardens and rock lawns, no barking dogs or native animal killing cats .

I think Brian is right about private swimming pools. As long as you have a cover it shouldn’t be a problem. We needn’t wack on the black armband and adopt oppressive measures.

Also pissing on your trees is a good alternative to flushing the toilet provided you don’t overdo it in the one place. My trees are thriving!

In defense of swimming pool owners, which we are, evaporation can be largely cured by a good quality pool blanket, which also stops the water from overheating in the blazing summer periods.

Mean evaporation here is about 1500mm pa, which is about 33% above mean precipitation. If you lose a net metre from a 9m x 5m pool in a dry year through evaporation you’d need 45,000 litres to top up. A lot of water.

We can allow our pool to rise or fall about 100mm from the ideal water level.

Last August when we had a tank installed we had to lower the water below the skimmer box because some pipes had to be rerouted. We refilled it to perhaps 25mm below ideal. Since then we haven’t put any water in at all. We’ve had 338mm of rain (against an average of 870) and the level is now a whisker above the ideal level. So we’ve gained about 25mm.

Just once, back in Jan-Feb we looked as though the next decent storm would see us releasing water. This can mean getting out there at 2am, which is a lot of fun. It didn’t happen.

So well-managed pools aren’t a problem in Brisvegas.

Get youself a water tank,good seed spuds coz the shit is hittin the fan. They will bloody talk about it for ages and do bloody nothin wankersâ?? says Norm.

We have had 23,500 litres of water tanks installed for 5 years – we have been largely self sustainable for water until the drought bit this year and we had to add some Melbourne water. You can peruse details here

Interestingly, their is currently no financial benefit in doing this as Melbourne water is priced so low – presumably to keep swimming pool owners happy. This is why changes to domestic water pricing – or bans on filling swimming pools – are urgently required.

Two options are – quadruple the cost of water used in excess of realistic domestic usage level (which may be tricky to calculate based on house occupants & land size?) of implement a domestic quota trading system (as per agricultural users) with a non-tradeable quota for basic domestic usage and a tradeable extra quota for each household that the market can establish a price for. Swimming pool owners could then bid for the extra water on the market to fill their pools.

Excess quotas would reduce if there was no water available for them.

I was kind of struck by W. announcing last week that he was praying for the Va Tech community, then next week John Howard saying we should pray for rain. Not particularly practical responses, either one.