One good serve deserves another

THE comment piece by Melissa Grant headed Madden Deserves a Serve for Lobbing the Ball into the Bidder’s Court (Gazette, 14 January) was an opportunistic stab at the Labor State Government. It had an obvious lack of any credible evidence to support the claims it made. Was it fair and balanced? Of course it wasn’t.
The Wonthaggi desalination project has been unpopular with a large proportion of the public from the start. Personally, I am pleased that the State Government is taking action to guarantee water supply to the population during a long period of dry weather.
You mention that another dam would be a better option for Victoria than a desalination plant. If you had researched the potential storage capacity of Melbourne’s four major reservoirs, it would have shown that these dams have the potential to store five times the annual water demand. This of course, assumes that these dams are being filled by regular rainfall, something we haven’t had in a long time.
The catchments have not been filling with the low rainfall over the past few years, so what is the alternative? Dams on the Thomson and Macalister rivers may seem feasible during wetter months of the year, but what would happen if another dry spell hit these areas?
We’ll just have another empty dam.
Dams are not environmentally conscious either. It’s critical that rivers such as the Thomson are able to flow into the Gippsland Lakes to flush the system that has also come under stress through this dry period.
In theory, water tanks are a good option, except that each one requires a pump that would collectively use as much power as the desalination plant. In practical terms, not every residence in Victoria has the space to install a water tank.
The opinion piece claims that the State Government is responsible for creating water shortage hysteria. I would say that unbalanced and inflated articles such as this are responsible for the hysterics.
Maida Anderson,
Bunyip.