After all, this increase sought by metropolitan water retailers didn't just fall out of the sky. It took a lot of stupid people, gripped by green faith, to bring you hugely bigger water bills for not a single extra drop of water.
That's right. As City West Water boss Anne Barker explained: "Those prices are based on the assumption that no desal water is ordered."
This surcharge is simply to pay for the new desalination plant, plus a few other works. Water is not included, since we won't actually need it for years now that two years of good rain have nearly filled our dams.
Here's another green farce that's cost a bomb while delivering a pffftt.
Yes, Melbourne did need another water supply. A city that's already added more than 1.5 million people since completing its last dam in 1984 was always going to run short come the inevitable drought.
Another dam was the cheap and obvious answer, and Melbourne Water costings suggest we could have built a new one at a quarter of the price for three times more water.
Trouble is, dams have become a green sin. As a Bracks Government committee on our water future proclaimed in 2006, dams were "no longer ... socially acceptable" and the real answer to running out of water was to, er, use less.
Astonishing to think of now, but this useless suggestion became government policy. Public fountains were emptied, sporting ovals left to die, prized gardens had water cut off.
And to counter my campaign for a dam, the Government ran ads throbbing with the neo-pagan vibe. No, we couldn't have a new dam because it would steal "water currently used by the rivers". As if inanimate rivers "used" water as humans did, with a sense of purpose.
Victoria became a green madhouse. We rationalists watched aghast as sinful dams were even drained to "save" the Snowy, Murray and half a dozen other rivers.
Even as dam levels dropped to dangerous lows, Labor kept flushing drinking water down the Yarra for its "environmental health". Fish before humans, green myths over brown gardens.
Most insane of all, the Government turned the reservation for a huge dam on Gippsland's Mitchell River into a national park to make sure no one could ever harvest the state's fastest-flowing river.
Only when Melbourne's dams looked close to draining in a long drought did Labor panic and order a new water supply pronto. Not a dam, though, but a desalination plant.
Sure, desal was grotesquely expensive, but Labor had found another green reason to ban dams. Global warming.
It fell for the claims of alarmists such as Chief Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery back in 2007 that "even the rain that falls isn't actually going to fill our dams and river systems", which made new dams useless. As Melbourne Water dutifully reported: "Unfortunately, we cannot rely on this kind of rainfall like we used to."
Two years of flooding rain later, look at the dams. Think how new dams would be filling nicely, too. And look at your damn water bills. Water, water everywhere, yet you'll now pay hundreds of dollars for a desal plant producing none.
Nor is that the only green madness for which we must pay.
We still subsidise wind farms that don't stop global warming, solar farms that fry dollars and green cars few want to buy. Then there's the pointless carbon tax ...
Time to put price stickers on them all, to teach how much unreason costs.
heraldsun.com.au 5 Nov 2012
Corporate fraud with government support at the highest level in politics.
The desalination plant is labelled as a failure, that will not produce water for years.
It is a deal that is full of claims of 'Money for Mates', racketeering, criminal activities including drug use, that the Australian tax payers are forced to pay for.
The people who are in charge of this should be sacked, never to work again.
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