Greens Urban Water Policy: working with the community in a dry climate

The major parties have underestimated the community’s willingness to treat water as a precious commodity and be part of the solution to drought, said Greens Candidate for Drummoyne, Bernard Rooney.

“The major parties have failed to read the community mood. There has been a welcome shift in support for water recycling, but we must not lose sight of the enormous capacity of the public to save water and use it more efficiently,” Mr Rooney said.

“The Greens plan for Sydney centres on rainwater tanks, local grey water treatment, stormwater harvesting, wastewater recycling, improved efficiency and stronger restrictions.”

Key points of Greens Water policy are:

• Clean water must be valued as an essential source of life and managed in an ecologically sustainable and socially just manner;

• Water catchments must be managed sustainably within their own confines and transfers between catchments must over time be eliminated; thus ending Sydney’s dependence on water extracted from the Shoalhaven River

• Establishing least-cost planning to redirect funding towards investment in water conservation and localised water reclamation programs and away from the expansion of water supply infrastructure such as dams, de-salination plants and end of pipe recycling schemes

• Urban wastewater management must focus on conservation, efficiency, treatment and reuse rather than on transport and discharge to environment

• Water, and the infrastructure that delivers and disposes of it, must remain a public resource under public ownership and control

• Ensuring water authorities develop a true-cost, user and polluter pays pricing system

• As urban water pressures are in part driven by climate change it is unacceptable and ultimately self-defeating to meet short term water scarcity by the use of energy intensive water extraction or treatment technologies that produce carbon emissions which in turn cause climate change. In other words, No to the proposed desalination plant.

Further Information:

Greens Urban Water Policy Summary

Greens Urban Water Policy (full version)

Greens NSW Policy Summaries Booklet (pdf 1.7mb)