Steph Cooke is the Opposition spokeswoman for water. Her opinion piece appears today in the Daily Telegraph
It’s enough to make your blood boil. Or in the case of residents of regional NSW, your water boil.
Thirteen regional towns and villages have been placed on boil water notices since December. That’s 13 communities warned that water from kitchen taps was not safe for consumption unless it had first been boiled in the kettle.
I’m reluctant to pit city against country, but if this was happening across suburbs in Sydney, I expect the level of government interest would be vastly different.
But, alarmingly, when asked during budget estimates to name the regional communities impacted by these boil water notices, the Water Minister was unable to call any to mind.
For her benefit, they include Yass, Murrumbateman, Bowning, Binalong, Boorowa, Moama, Brungle, Jindabyne, Lakewood, Leesville, the High Country, Jerilderie, and Nimbin.
The residents of Yass and the surrounding communities are the latest to have been told not to drink their tap water; that equates to close to 10,000 people, all living just down the road from our nation’s capital.
When asked during estimates if she knew about the situation in Yass, the minister said she was aware, but was then forced to concede she had done nothing to help alleviate the problem.
This was an extraordinary admission; aren’t our governments supposed to be proactive in times like this? Especially when the alert was issued smack-bang in the middle of a summer heatwave.
The bottled water aisle at the local supermarkets had been stripped bare, local schools were forced to ship in bottles of water for the students, and residents were threatening not to pay their water bills because their water wasn’t safe to drink, and yet all we heard from the government was crickets.
The Yass alert has been lifted for now, but amid the current cost-of-living crisis, is it right that regional communities are being forced to buy bottled water at great expense to household budgets? Not to mention the added hit to the electricity bill after having to boil the kettle every time you need a drink of water.
I fear this lack of awareness – and dare I suggest concern – about regional water issues points to a broader problem: a failure by the NSW Labor government to prioritise the water portfolio.
The Water Minister has been in the role for close to 12 months, and all the government has managed to achieve is cancelling visionary projects like raising the Wyangala Dam wall, signing us up to a sham and highly opaque Murray Darling Basin Plan deal, and kicking key water security projects further down the road.
It would be unfair to be too critical. The Water Minister does have other portfolio responsibilities including housing, homelessness, mental health, and youth; all present significant challenges that the government is struggling to address.
But water is too important to be treated as an afterthought. It is our lifeblood, no matter where you live, but sadly this government has shown it is well and truly adrift when it comes to water.
