Stop wasting water

Sensible people have their water storage facilities ready – new dams and weirs built, silt cleaned out, dam walls and overflows checked, no leaves clogging the tank strainers.

Australia must build more dams for flood mitigation, urban water supply and irrigation. Most East Coast Rivers have surplus water that races to the sea during floods. It could be conserved.

And it is time to apply our engineering skills to building the Bradfield water scheme – it will certainly provide better returns to Australians than green energy dreams like Snowy 2 or powerlines from Northern Territory to Singapore.

A sensible society would identify the best dam sites and have a long-term plan for acquiring and preserving the land rights needed for them. We do the reverse. Decisions are postponed until the need is critical. Then landowners with vested interests, green busybodies and media stirrers manage to scare the politicians, and the water conservation proposal is killed.

Then the "No Dams Ever" Mafia takes over, trying to sterilise the site for all future dams by quietly changing land-use or vegetation classifications. Then they search for (or manufacture) evidence of native title or endangered species, and declare national parks over critical areas.

Green destroyers have also grossly mismanaged stored water by insisting on excessive and ill-timed "environmental" flows. This is a scheme where you build a dam to catch water and then try to manage the water as if the dam did not exist. It is very slow and expensive to get this lost water back from the sea using the Flannery desalination plants.

Existing dams have two great enemies - silting which gradually steals their water capacity, and evaporation which continually steals the water itself. Our engineers can manage "desilting" and CSIRO could divert some resources from climate alarmism to reducing evaporation from water supply dams.

But most of all we need more stored water. The wet La Nina will inevitably be followed by a droughty El Nino.

Let's find a new Joh who will build more dams.