The Queensland desalination project

The article below was written before 12.12.19.  How do I know that?  Because it refers to the drought.  And for most of 2019 Queensland was indeed unusually dry.  On the night of 12.12.19 however, Brisbane had the mother and father of a storm that delivered 6 months of rain in one hour.  And there was a similar storm down the coast a couple of days later. So both the Wivenhoe and the Hinze dam (which are linked) would have received a big boost

It is particularly good for the dams to get all that rain at once. If the fall had been spread out over a long period, much of the fall would have been lost to evaporation and soaking into the ground.

The desalination project was an absolute boondoggle from the beginning. It was started by a Leftist government as an alternative to building a dam. It took years to get it working properly so it is lucky that the rains came and rendered it unnecessary.  It is however some consolation to hear that it is finally working and being marginally useful


DESALINATE or die. That was the dire warning from then-premier Peter Beattie as he was confronted by a lone protester at the under-construction Gold Coast desalination plant during the so-called "Millennium Drought" in 2000.

The protester, local green activist Inge Light, had slipped through a security detail to shirtfront Beattie about the controversial $1.2 billion project's environmental and financial costs.

"I've got to be honest with you, we're going to build it(the plant), we've got no choice -- unless you go up there and play God and make it rain for me," the premier declared. "If you don't allow us to get desalinated water, frankly no one's going to be alive. "If we don't have desal, we're not going to have any water. "If you don't have water, you're dead.'

It may not be quite life or death. Beattie, wasn't averse to a bit of hyperbole — but as Queensland grapples with arguably its worst drought on record, the Tugun desalination plant is playing a key role in keeping water flowing to residents in the state's south-east.

Largely on "hot standby" since it opened in 2009 due to consistent rain events, the facility has been cranked up to full capacity after a tinder-dry spring and early summer which has seen dam levels plummet.

Since hitting 100 per cent production on November 18, the plant has pumped more than two billion litres of water into the southeast Queensland water grid. It represents about 15 per cent of the region's water use, currently averaging at 212 litres per person per day, up from 183 litres this time last year.

The first large-scale desalination plant on Australia's east coast (Perth's plant opened in 2006), the Tugun facility occupies a sprawling site next to Gold Coast Airport, a few hundred metres from the beach. It was originally planned as a much smaller Gold Coast City Council facility. But as the Millennium Drought bit deeper, the Beattie government invested almost $870 million in the project to more than double its capacity to 133 megalitres per day.

Gold Coast mother and environmentalist Inge Light wept at Gold Coast City Hall in October 2006 after councillors voted 12-2 to approve the project, saying it would worsen global warming and damage the marine environment "I'm emotional because I see my children's future being affected by global warming," she told The Courier-Mail at the time. "It's incredibly sad and incredibly frustrating that we've got yesterday's politicians making tomorrow's decisions."

But the council, led by green-leaning mayor Ron Clarke, decided  overwhelmingly that the desal plant was needed, and urgently. "The region will run out of water if we don't deal with this and make the hard decisions," then finance committee chair and now Southport MP Rob Molhoek said.

Construction began irmnediately by an "alliance", incvolving  French water giant Veolia, construction firm John Holland, infrastructure company Cardno and engineers Sinclair Knight Metz.

In 2007, The Courier-Mail revealed that Veolia expected to take in at least $351 million from running the desal plant over the following decade. Anna Bligh, who had succeeded Beattie as premier, took the first sip of desalinated water at a Tugun open day in December 2008.

The plant officially opened in January 2009, but the State Government refused to accept ownership after a raft of serious defects were revealed, including rusting pipes, cracking concrete and faulty valves, as well as concerns over potential contaminants leaching from the former Tugun rubbish dump on which the facility was built.

In April 2009, the plant, supposedly the showpiece of the $9 billion south-east Queensland water grid, was shut down for almost six weeks as technical experts crawled through pipes to pinpoint faults. A year later, the plant was again shut down, this time for three months, as a giant barge was brought in to make repairs. Only months later, south-east Queensland was hit by the devastating 2010-11 floods.

Critics have labelled the desal plant a costly white elephant, but it has been used to help supply water during floods as well as drought, and when water treatment plants have been shut down for upgrades.

The Courier-Mail recently took a tour of the plant with its manager, Tina Feenstra. Right on cue for our visit, the heavens have opened. "It's a running joke for us here: whenever we're at full capacity, it starts raining," Feenstra says, handing us umbrellas.

Feenstra explains the desalination process, which begins with sea water being fed through a 4m mushroom-like inlet on the seabed, about 1km offshore, and into a pipeline to the plant. Larger particles are screened out before the water passes through a finer filter which removes smaller particles. The water is then pre-treated in large tanks which blend small suspended particles into clumps which are then removed by sand filters.

Next, the main process begins — removing the salt. The water passes through thousands of reverse osmosis membranes to purify the water. It ends up being so pure, Feenstra explains, that chemicals and minerals then have to be re-added to make the water suitable to drink before it is pumped into the water grid.

Desalinated water does not come cheap, costing up to $800 a megalitre to produce. It's also energy-intensive, consuming the equivalent electricity of about 12,000 houses a day when running at full capacity.

"But when it's hotter and drier than average as it is now, having use of a facility like this is a real asset, particularly when we don't know how long this drought will last," Feenstra says.

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail" of January 4, 2020







Status anxiety and the tyranny of opinion

John Carroll

Proclaiming your own shallow virtue from the pulpit of social media has become the new religion.

As the year of identity politics, 2019, is now at an end, we should ask what has been going on.

The return of medieval heresy trials, draconian inquisition and pseudo-religious cults preaching apocalypse demands some inter­pretation. The new wars are over opinion. Belief has been separated from fact. In parallel, status has shifted from property and achievement to attitudes. Even a summer of catastrophic bushfire often has been co-opted by doomsday politics rather than met, as it should be, by sober gravity, sympathy and reflection on the nature and history of this harsh continent.

One obvious manifestation of insecure identity is status anxiety. Throughout the modern period, people have compensated for doubts about their worth by showing off their wealth, displayed in large houses, luxury cars, designer clothes and expensive holidays; living in prestigious suburbs; and sending their children to elite schools and universities.

They have indulged in what American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen dubbed “conspicuous consumption”.

Rise of the new snobs

The new snobbery, however, is not over bad taste, crude accents, cheap belongings and the wrong schools; it is over attitudes.

Some boast on Instagram that they personally carbon offset when flying #climatechange, and attract a stream of likes. Others tweet they support gay marriage #loveislove, and are deluged in hearts of approval. Thousands swarm against a Michael Leunig cartoon. This shift in the signals of status must be, in part, a feature of affluence — the markers of economic success matter less these days — combined with the fact the noise is coming almost exclusively from the ranks of the better off. In the upper middle class, comfort may be taken for granted.

The root of identity politics is revealed in its designation: in identity and its discontents. Mind, there is nothing new in anxiety about self. Seventeenth-century French moralist Francois de La Rochefoucauld argued that self-esteem was the strongest of human motivating forces. Vanity, egoism and fear of embarrassment and failure drive most human behaviour. In the pre-modern world, this was less universally true, for more than 90 per cent of the population had little time or energy left over from the daily grind of basic survival. Concern about identity was a leisure-time luxury they could ill afford.

The key to secure identity is an inner confidence underpinned by belief and belonging. Belief is primary. German sociologist Max Weber coined the term disenchantment to describe the central threat confronting the modern West. In a secular time that no longer believed in God, or indeed in any transcendental ordering principle, the risk was that the world would lose its magic and be come a dull and prosaic absurdity. Humans were left to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, and little else.

Samuel Beckett highlighted this condition in Waiting for Godot, arguably the most important play of the 20th century. For Beckett’s two tramps, life has become so pointless that they talk of suicide but can’t be bothered carrying it out. Meaning has become the modern problem.

In fact, faith in God has been replaced, in the shadows, by an alternative potential commanding attachment: that there are deep and enduring truths that underpin the human condition; and, further, that the good life depends on gaining some understanding of them and managing to live in harmony with them. These truths are elusive, and difficult to formulate and enshrine; Shakespeare’s entire work may be read as a wrestling to uncover their complex texture.

Things were much easier in the time of church religion, with priests, teaching orders, theology and doctrine, an absolute moral calculus, and a vast background of tradition, monumental buildings, music and art — all dedicated to proclaiming the faith.

As the West progressively moved into a post-Christian era, high culture and the universities became of vital social importance. Their guiding mission was to help ordinary people better understand their lives, and in particular bear the hardships and tragedies that beset them. They did this through telling stories about life in its manifold variety — in literature, art, music and more recently film — and then interpreting them. Across the past 1½ centuries, this mission, in the main, has been progressively abandoned. As a result, loss of faith has left a vacuum and the anti-belief, if pressed, that there is nothing.

Weariness rules

The need for faith, or some secular equivalent, seems to be universal. Without it, there is the uprootedness of Beckett’s demoralised tramps, who have no mental chart to guide them through the day, the month and the year.

Human identity without firm and distinct shape is condemned to leading a haphazard existence, motivated by profane pleasure and the pursuit of power. Pleasures diminish and power is capricious. A vacancy of belief drives some to seek tranquillisers and intoxicants; others to seek militant secular faiths. Those pseudo-religions, in turn, are given to a paranoid polarising of the world into good and evil. The psychology is familiar, from earlier times, when churches, out of their own insecurity, persecuted heretics, witches or those they deemed nonconformist.

Shaky medieval religion also triggered apocalyptic sects, which we see re-emerging today in an uncanny regression to our most superstitious past.

Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg provides a case study. Her demean­our and mode of declam­ation mimics that of a fundamentalist Christian preacher ranting about the end of the world. The intense eyes, the raging warnings of apocalypse and the incantatory chant of “How dare you!” pitched against the satanic adult world are reminiscent of some cult spawned in Waco, Texas.

There was a Children’s Crusade in the early Middle Ages: something like 20,000 children, led by two of their number, set out from France to free Jerusalem from unbelievers. The crusade foundered well before its destination, in starvation and disaffection.

There is also the other recent eruption of Extinction Rebellion, a movement of self-styled soldiers of virtue parading as if cast from the Book of Revelation. From London to Melbourne, they came hooded and garbed in bright crimson robes, faces painted white, with thin red lips, a cross between a medieval dance-of-death procession and spooky Hare Krishnas. These martyrs glue themselves to buildings and seek arrest — that is, look for self-vindicating persecution by evil authority.

Whatever the truth about ­climate change, the Extinction ­Rebellion apocalypse is based on a radical inflation of long-term global warming forecasts, in themselves as unreliable as economic forecasts, if not more so. Eminent Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith quipped that economic forecasting was invented to give astrology a good name.

Identity politics obeys the catchcry: I emote virtuously, there­fore I am

End of the world is nigh

Greta is not in herself of interest. What is alarming is that she has been taken seriously by the worldwide media, listened to devoutly by broad sections of the upper middle class and its cultural elites, given a platform at the UN and celebrated as Time person of the year.

Professional orders that are otherwise sober, serious, hardworking and methodical in their practical lives are turning, in their leisure, to quasi-religious venting, dark paranoid fantasy and wide-eyed righteous indignation.

This crusading opinion is being generated from within a tiny social bubble. Sociologist Peter Murphy has calculated from Twitter statistics that a mere 2 per cent of the American adult population deal in political opinion. The rest who use Twitter gossip about celebrities and lifestyle — but that too may come with a malevolent thrust, as experienced by Meghan Markle and the barrage of hate opinion she has attracted on social media, some of which has an overlapping political cast.

In last year’s federal election, climate change was proved to be a minority worry, playing a negligible role among mainstream voters, who remained uninterested.

The take-up of social media has meant angry opinion, which used to be limited to berating this or that political figure at the pub or the golf club, may be broadcast instantly and worldwide. It provides the mouthpiece for a global cacophony of hatred, malicious gossip, derision and persecution of those who are different, and coercive opinion containing the implicit threat: agree with me or else.

Foundation stones of the modern West crack: the liberal value of freedom of individual conscience, the Enlightenment values of reasoned argument and freedom of speech, and the civilised values of moderation and courtesy.

The ease of fingertip communication has aggravated the tendency for anyone, when hot under the collar, to speak impulsively and thoughtlessly, and to judge without mounting a clearly reasoned case. As people spend more of their leisure time on smartphones and less reading books, they develop habits in themselves ill-suited to measured reflection.

Addiction to social media brings with it a feverish restlessness of concentration and, it seems, a dependency on approval.

This is a trait that has taken centre stage, with posts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter receiving hearts and thumbs-up to indicate likes, even though the likes often come from strangers giving the post a few passing seconds of their time.

That recognition for a post comes in the form of a love heart is suggestive of an underlying depressive strain in the culture.

No depth or sense of self

At the pathological extreme, this kind of brittle self-esteem links with an inability to handle criticism, as with the 20-year old apprentice plumber whose work is corrected by his boss, sending him into a two-day sulk. Or univer­sities offering counselling for students whose sensitivities may have been damaged by opinions they disagree with. Or The Australian’s cartoonist Bill Leak being investigated by the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Identity politics obeys the catchcry: I emote virtuously, there­fore I am. The specific content is often unimportant, as illustrated by a low inclination to mar­shal arguments to back up opinion.

The in-vogue markers of identity today — sexual orientation, race, hostility to Western civilisation, and the environment — are more free-floating excuses for enthusiasm than real personal traits, for few of the crusaders are cross-gender, native peoples, Gandhi-like ascetics or Greenpeace sailors.

The enthusiasm is then expressed as high-voltage opinion on social media, during political demonstrations and in graffiti.

The logic of this type of depressive narcissism finds its main reward in the tick of approval. The thumbs-up or love heart is inflated in the imagination as recognition for the lonely self as a whole, the sum total of its identity, which is more than the specifics of its opinions. At the same time, self-esteem has become so fragile, the ego so lacking in confidence, that the mere whisper of a dissident view pricks the emoting bubble.

Even major institutions have taken to emoting virtuously. In part this has been to cover up the fact they have excluded while they have embraced. The mission statements of corporations, universities and sporting bodies proudly boast of inclusiveness, tolerance and diversity. But the more they do so, the more they have practised discrimination, intolerance and politically correct conformism.

Sigmund Freud termed this pathological syndrome negation, as in the aggressive smile — “to smile and smile and be a villain”. Negation was illustrated politically by the former East Germany, one of the nastiest dictatorships of the modern era, which called itself the German Democratic Republic.

It is not surprising, then, that belief has become separated from act. Others are judged by what they believe, not by what they do. Footballer Israel Folau and tennis great Margaret Court have been chosen as the local scapegoats.

Last year Rugby Australia, it seems, preferred to signal its own virtue than concern itself with the wellbeing of its sport, in on-field performance or its own balance sheet. Mimicking medieval relig­ious fanaticism, it persecuted its best player for his unmodish beliefs, likely picking on him because he was its best player — the more brilliant his rugby, the more evil his character.

Many professional footballers, if grilled on their attitudes, would not pass the heresy test. What separated Folau from the others is, first, rugby super-stardom; and, second, the unusual fact today that he strongly believes in something. His faith confronts and irritates. For the minority who are themselves fanatical believers, such as devotees of Extinction Rebellion and Greta, Folau is a true heretic worshipping the wrong god.

Likewise with Court. The fact she was the nation’s best female tennis player, and arguably the world’s best tennis player, makes her a beacon of sporting excellence. She has to be burnt at the stake because she lends authority to heresy, even though that heresy is the traditional view of marriage held by most of the Western world until very recently, and still held by a sizeable minority of Australians.

The Folau and Court cases tell us something more. The moral views at issue are not particularly shocking, for the public heat has gone out of both domains. Folau’s attitude to homosexuals is, to most minds, ludicrous, even laughable, as is his belief in Hell; and the same-sex marriage controversy is over, and decided, so who should care what Court thinks?

But crusading religion needs its devils, even if they are rather quaint and feeble devils. The sniff of evil provides blood energy.

Virtual shallowness

Communal belonging traditionally has proved the most successful way to compensate for the insecure identity that derives from the lack of much to believe in.

What sociologists call anomie results when community ties break down — anomie is the sense the world lacks cohesive norms and values. Strong community binds people together with shared purposes and common beliefs, providing a collective glue that helps its members feel at home in their world, with confidence about what they should do and how they should live their lives.

Today, the nuclear family provides the most common and successful example, with a lesser, supporting role played by schools, clubs and other associations.

The virtual community enabled by social media is not an entirely satisfactory substitute. It is, in general, less stable and enduring than the family, less tightly bound, and it mobilises a fickle, less cohesive legitimacy. More, it encourages aggregates of shared opinion rather than shared doing or face-to-face gathering together.

The disenchantment that follows from lack of belief in any fundamental truths anchoring the human condition has led to some malign compensations. It has unhinged the all-too-human search for security of individual identity.

Hell has gone, but not the belief in satanic forces and their incarnations. Christ the saviour has gone but not the belief in redemptive politics. The more atheist ranks have grown, the more we have seen, with religion, a Freudian return of the repressed. The best of secular values — freedom of conscience and opinion, underwritten by a liberal-democratic order — are suffering under an onslaught from the worst excesses of religion: the tyranny of right­eous opinion, fanatical preach­­ing and the persecution of heresy.

SOURCE  







Somewhere over the ditch there’s an imaginary utopia

It’s a reality of Western democracies that the most estranged citizens tend to come from the most successful and best-educated sections of society. The phenomenon is best described as alienation, a feeling of dissociation from fellow citizens and their elected leaders.

Take Melbourne barrister Julian Burnside. He lives a lifestyle to which most Australians would aspire. But he’s not happy with his lot. On New Year’s Day, Burnside tweeted: “The only thing worse than #ScottyFromMarketing as PM is the possibility of @PeterDutton replacing him. If that happens, it will be time to move to NZ where they HAVE a real leader.”

Those with a sense of deja vu may recall that it is not the first time Burnside has threatened to quit the land of his birth following political disappointment. Before the 2004 election, he foreshadowed an intention to consider “leaving Australia if John Howard were re-elected”.

When this occurred, Burnside conceded that inertia was a powerful reason for staying in Australia. He added that “the effort of selling up and moving to New Zealand or Canada and re-establishing a ­career is formidable”. And so it came to pass that Burnside remained in Australia and unsuccessfully contested last year’s election as the endorsed Greens candidate in the Melbourne seat of Kooyong.

Burnside worked hard to defeat Josh Frydenberg with the help of leftist activist groups such as GetUp. But the ­Coalition won both seats and votes in the election. Rather than accept that Scott Morrison is the duly elected Prime Minister of Australia, Burnside, who paraded his AO QC post-nominals in the election campaign, refers to Morrison as “ScottyFromMarketing”. This is just a sneer.

In the unlikely scenario Dutton replaces Morrison as prime minister and the even more unlikely scenario that, in such a situation, Burnside would pack up his Melbourne mansion and head to Auckland or Wellington, what would he find? Well, not a Greens-style utopia, that’s for sure.

The fascination of some Australians with New Zealand seems to have coincided with the elevation of New Zealand Labour Party leader Jacinda Ardern to Prime Minister in September 2017, leading a minority government with the support of New Zealand First led by Winston Peters.

Without doubt, Ardern is a successful politician with an ability to project empathy. But her political legacy has yet to be established. Despite this, some Australians appear to have fallen in love with Ardern’s New Zealand.

At a post-budget business function in Sydney in April last year, ABC presenter Ellen Fanning introduced panellist Sir John Key, a former conservative New Zealand prime minister, with the statement: “Don’t we love a New Zealand prime minister in Australia, any of them are fine.”

Last month Nine Entertainment newspapers published an article by Neil McMahon, who suggested that what he termed “Kiwi envy” was a phenomenon “afflicting modern Australia”. He referred to “the election of global icon Jacinda Ardern, whose disarming political charm and boldness (have) left many Australians gazing forlornly across the ditch and wondering: what happened to us?”

Earlier this month Nine newspapers published a column by playwright Ned Manning, who maintained that Australia’s victory in the Boxing Day Test “exposed the evolving essential difference between the two neighbouring countries”. Yes, according to Manning, you can generalise about a nation by watching its men’s cricket team in action.

Manning’s point was that the Aussies were technically superior but the Kiwis “seemed to have the whole thing in perspective”. He did not like “the incessant chest beating of our players”. Fair enough. But it’s a stretch to claim “a lack of self-confidence makes us take ourselves seriously” based on the behaviour of a dozen men in cricketing whites. According to Manning, Australia might defeat New Zealand at cricket “but we have a fair way to go when it comes to defining who we are”.

He argued that New Zealanders “have an anthem that reflects their, not someone else’s, culture; they are unafraid to stand up for themselves on issues such as climate change and, famously in the past, nuclear arms; and they have a treaty” with the Maori people.

Manning’s comment about the New Zealand national anthem is not readily understandable. However, he overlooked the fact Key’s National Party government restored imperial honours — knights and dames — in 2009 (they had been abolished by ­Labour in 2000). Also, in 2016, most New Zealanders voted in a referendum against Key’s proposal that the Union Flag (Union Jack) should be removed from the top left corner of the nation’s flag.

It’s true New Zealand has ­denied US nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed ships access to its ports. But it’s also true that through the years New Zealand has obtained its defence on the cheap, relying on the military assets of US and Australia to protect its sea lanes and air lanes.

Members of the Kiwi fan cub in Australia, like Burnside, rarely protest against how little New Zealand does with respect to its refugee and humanitarian intake. At five million people, New Zealand’s population is about one-fifth of Australia’s yet it accepts far fewer than one-fifth of those who find refuge in the area of Austral­asia. Then there is the fact, as Australian Energy Minister Angus Taylor has pointed out, that New Zealand’s carbon dioxide emissions are increasing, not declining.

Sure, the Land of the Long White Cloud is a fine place to live. But its population is unlikely to blossom following an intake of Australians. There is no evidence in suburban, rural or regional Australia that citizens are thinking about doing a Burnside and seeking political refuge across the Tasman. This is just a fantasy for some Australians who can afford to be alienated.

SOURCE  






Teachers rushed in

Students hired to fill widening gap

AN INCREASING number of Queensland university students are being approved to teach before they have officially graduated, as the state is gripped by a shortage of educators. The Courier-Mail can reveal that last year, 99 students in education courses were granted Permission to Teach (PTT) waivers by Education Queensland to help fill the gap in schools without enough teachers — 39 more early approvals than in 2018.

But a Department of Education spokeswoman said the number of teachers on PTT represented "only a fraction of all new teachers hired" and they taught in schools for an average of one semester. The spokeswoman said that the approvals issued included those for students who had finished their courses, but were yet to graduate and be registered as teachers.

The main criteria for a PTT, which is assessed by the Queensland College of Teachers, includes evidence that no "appropriate" registered teacher is already available for that position, and evidence that the applicant has the skills and ability relevant to the job, and is "suitable to teach".

Queensland Teachers' Union president Kevin Bates said the process should be used only as a last resort and he was concerned the number issued was increasing. Mr Bates said that a concerning number of teachers were already forced to teach outside of their specialty, and this could place increasing pressure on new teachers employed under PTTs.

"It can complicate things enormously ... in remote and rural areas you usually have to teach something you're not trained in, and that involves an enormous amount of additional work," he said. "A teacher in a western school who is trained as a junior primary school teacher is teaching a secondary art and a math class simply because there aren't enough teachers.

"PTT should be a last resort only and should not be seen as an easy option for HR systems to fill a gap. We need to have a long-term view to make sure teachers are available to teach every class."

Mr Bates said those teachers needed more support. "If they're coming in on PTT, the standard induction and support of the Beginning to Teach program is simply not enough."

During 2019, the department employed more than 1400 new teachers, and 500 new teachers have already accepted appointments to start in 2020, an Education spokeswoman said.

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail" of 15 Jan., 2020


 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here