Melbourne has experienced the driest year in 40 years but more than 450 billion litres of water has run off its streets, Shadow Minister for Country Water Resources and Deputy Leader of The Nationals Peter Walsh has revealed.
Mr Walsh said Premier John Brumby had allowed close to the equivalent of Melbourne’s entire annual water consumption to go to waste because his government has refused to invest in stormwater capture initiatives.
“A staggering amount of water – more than 450 billion litres – ran off the city’s streets in the first half of the year,” Mr Walsh said.
“Instead of harvesting this water, the Brumby Government is wasting taxpayers’ money on a project to pipe water from one of the most drought-stricken regions in the state.
“The water not harvested during the extraordinarily dry past six months would have filled the Upper Yarra, Greenvale, Silvan, Tarago, Sugarloaf, Maroondah, Yan Yean and O’Shannassy dams.
“It was the equivalent of receiving every single month what the north-south pipeline will deliver annually at full capacity.”
Mr Walsh said the figures, calculated using the impervious runoff rate determined by scientists at Monash University’s Institute for Sustainable Water Resources, underlined the foolishness of Labor’s plans to pump water from northern Victoria to Melbourne.
“Melbourne covers an area of 8,831 square kilometres. Over the past six months the city has received 126.2 millimetres of rain, less than half the long term average of 307 millimetres,” Mr Walsh said.
“If the rate of runoff is calculated using the 42 per cent impervious urban stormwater catchment, as per Monash University’s study, then we have seen 468 billion litres of water run into Port Phillip and Western Port bays.”
Mr Walsh said the lost water could have guaranteed environmental flows to the Yarra River and substituted potable water used by industry and parks and gardens.
“The folly of the north-south pipeline is glaringly obvious. The government’s most senior water bureaucrat David Downie has admitted the assumptions on which the pipeline is being built have ‘now proven incorrect’,” Mr Walsh said.
“And this is all while billions and billions of litres of water go gurgling down Melbourne’s gutters.
“For years the state’s food producing regions have secured their crops by capturing and storing rain when it falls. Melbourne should do the same. The government must harvest the billions of litres of water that fall on the city’s streets each year to supply Melbourne’s non-drinking water needs.”
Media contact: Peter Walsh (03) 5032 3154
