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| Liquid Gold | |
Toowoomba Mayor Di Thorley has found herself in the poo with some of the locals
following her suggestion that the town's drinking water shortage can be solved
by recycling. A grand idea, and one that every greenie would wet his pants
about - unless they were one of the ones who actually had to do it. Recycling
in this case is not just keeping a token compost bin in the backyard and
letting a pair of chooks pick through it, so you can pretend you are saving the
planet. This issue will flush out the hardened greenies from the weekend
worriers. They are talking about recycling sewage. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and where most of us would just see a
dirty old sewage water, Mayor Thorley sees liquid gold. Such
entrepreneurialism in private enterprise would be admirable, but politicians
(especially women politicians) are supposed to spend their time kissing
babies and wringing their hands while proclaiming 'what about
the little children? and quietly raising taxes. Of course anyone who has thought it through knows that this is a storm in a
toilet bowl. No-one is making any more water. Every drop of H2O has
been recycled already from .. well somewhere. We might like to believe that
God's filtration system is better than the lazy council worker's down the road,
but in principle it's the same thing. Adelaidians have always lamented that by
the time water gets to Adelaide (via the Murray) it has already been drunk
three times. Toowoombahians might about to get a taste of the same thing. And no-one will be actually forced to drink the stuff. People would drink (on
average) less that two litres of water a day, and water in this quantity could
easily be imported and purchased at the local super market. Of course with a competitive private water market this would not be an issue.
While giving each householder a choice of 'recycled or not' would be a bit of a
challenge, smaller communities could make their own choice. Some would prefer
to pay a premium for non-recycled water, and others would choose the cheaper
variety. In fact poorer people could even make money by selling their rights to
higher quality water to rich people. Everyone could be better off. But no -
the socialist state dictates that everyone has to have the same water at the
same standard. People's choices are taken away 'to make us equal'. At least every yokel will know what graffiti to write on the the toilet wall of
the local restaurant: Flush hard. It has to make it all the way to the kitchen.
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