🗣️ "Water Issues in Australia & Queensland"

Host: David Zetland
Guest: John Quiggin | Australian Laureate Fellow | University of Queensland
Category: 🗣️ Opinion | Water in Australia

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Podcast’s Essential Bites:

[2:28] “Water is our big issue in Australia. […] There are really two integrated sets of problems. One is, water supply. Nearly all major cities have been on some restricted water use for quite some years. And the other is the Murray Darling Basin, which is our large agricultural area […] that had long standing problems of over allocation, underpricing and so forth.”

[8:51] “What we are doing is desal almost everywhere. And while it isn't crazy, it's not […] good economics.”

[9:19] “We've been doing this [water] market stuff […] since the 90s. We got a bunch of things wrong. We started with too many rights allocated.”

[19:02] “The typical urban price we're looking at, which is desal, is something like $1.50 a kilo liter. [Which is very expensive.]”

[39:01] “[What happened during the last major drought] is very effective rationing. The average per person intake at the height of the drought in Brisbane was reduced to 130 liters per person per day, which is just over 20 gallons.”

[41:10] “Everything's metered here. So they started by looking if you're using 10,000 liters a day. […] Within the city, they didn't have an active enforcement program, but they did go and find everybody who's using a lot of water and said, please explain.”