Usually state and territory Governments are happy to subsidise, bribe, cajole and attract businesses. They cite the mantra of jobs, jobs, jobs.
But other times other mantras are more powerful, for example: water, water, water.
Stage 4 water restrictions are about to be imposed because the Government must be seen to be doing something, and, admittedly, Canberra’s water supply is under some strain.
Nurseries, car wash places and the swimming-pool industry are under threat.
The swimming-pool and spa industry employs directly and indirectly about 200 people. Nurseries and car-wash people might get a reprieve, but the swimming-pool industry looks doomed.
It shouldn’t be. In fact, you can make an argument that, far from being a burden on water supply, encouraging swimming pool construction could be water-neutral.
But there is no way the Government will permit the filling or topping up of swimming pools. under Stage 4 restrictions which prohibit outdoor watering. Gosh the voters would rebel at the idea of allowing rich toads to fill their yuppie pools. Forget the construction jobs. Forget the health benefits of a lap pool.
I’m lucky our pool went in and was filled before the bans and can be topped up with water from the roof. But a friend of mine is about to build a small pool and has been met with a prohibition from using the town supply for a one-off filling. He is a bit fortunate because his house is cleverly designed. It has no roof gutters and the water collects in a series of ponds. He figures he can harvest enough water to fill it, but it will take time.
But let’s do the sums. Most pools these days are smaller lap pools with an area of about 25 square metres. Canberra’s evaporation rate is about 1000mm (a metre), about one and a half times its rainfall. Even without a cover, that makes for just 25,000 litres. If you had a lawn or garden beds where the pool and surrounding paving was, you would use more than that (probably about 30,000 litres) to give it 10 minutes of watering three times a week.
Swimming pools use less than gardens – especially pools with covers.
The initial filling is the problem. You need about 50,000 litres. It sounds a lot but it is only about a sixth of the average annual household consumption.
There is an obvious trade-off here: just require that any household which installs a pool must also install a rainwater tank or tanks totalling, say, 3000 litres. But the swimming-pool industry tells me this idea has been rejected.
A 3000 litre tank would provide the equivalent of the initial fill in six months and provide the top-ups indefinitely, with plenty left over for other uses that would otherwise come from town water.
A 200 square metre house captures about 100,000 litres in an average year. (There are some advantages to these McMansions and Bogan Villas.)
Moreover, you can use a tank quite efficiently when you use it to counter evaporation from a pool, because the pool has five or six centimetres of buffer in its water level. You can top it to the brim after rain and let it fall five or six centimetres before topping it up again, by then it might have rained again to refill the tank.
The Government and Actew should do a bit more thinking on water. Nearly all of their solutions involve adding to the Actew supply – pumping water into it from the Murrumbidgee, from recyled sewage, from one dam to another, from a bigger dam and so on.
This is fine for Actew. Remember it makes a profit – when the drought is over it will still want to make a profit. And the Government will want it to make a profit, because Actew pays it a juicy dividend which it can spend on pleasing the voters.
You see if you get a rainwater tank and harvest 100,000 litres of usable water, that takes about $230 off your water bill a year, and off Actew’s profit. Actew’s costs are fairly finite, every extra it sells is almost pure profit. Every bit the householder saves, however, is taken from the top of the bill where Actew charges at a higher rate per litre. The $230 a year wouldl almost finance a tank. If the Government’s rebate scheme were a bit more fair dinkum, it would tip the balance.
Queensland gives a $1000 rebate for any domestic tank. The ACT only gives a rebate if the tank is connected to toilets or laundry inside, which adds to the cost. And there are no rebates in suburbs where tanks are compulsory. But in any event, with the convenience of being able to water your garden and save expensive plants, the balance is heading towards rainwater tanks.
Ironically, in the long term that is not palatable for Actew or the Government. One day the drought will end. If by then, however, 150,000 tanks had been installed under Government encouragement, Actew revenue would be down by $30 million a year.
As it happens, tanks now make even more sense. As Actew is fond of pointing out, this drought has revealed the real weakness in Canberra’s water situation is poor rain and run-off in the catchment while Canberra itself has been getting only slightly lower than average rain. Tanks in Canberra are making more sense.
Several years ago the economics pointed the other way. The cost of all those tanks might have been better spent on a dam – but not if the dam is in a place with little run off.
Further, encouraging tanks would help create and save some jobs – including those in the swimming pool industry if you had to install a tank as a condition of being allowed to fill your pool.