South Australia’s current water restrictions are foolish in my opinion and lifting the blanket bans on water used in Adelaide’s gardens makes sense to me provided that people pay for the water that they use.  I have been saying this for some long time now.

It is nonsense letting beautiful old trees die because of bureaucratic rules, while people can spend as long as they like under a shower.  Household use has not been restricted.

With the proviso that I would like to see monthly rather than quarterly bills for water so people don’t get caught out too much by the change I think this is a sensible move.  We should pay market price for the water we use and let price dictate our restrictions and change our behaviour.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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Senator Wong was on television this week telling us that storm water can’t be made potable – what does she think the Murray River is?  I have never heard anything so silly.

The Murray river is the stormwater “drain” for around one third of Australia.  Added to it is a potent mix of agricultural runoff, chemicals and fertilizers included, sewage effluent (treated) from the towns along the river system, untreated from various recreational users, cattle and sheep and too many other inputs to bear thinking about.  This is treated to potable standard by towns along the river system including Adelaide and even more remote places like Whyalla.

I must confess that Adelaide’s potable version of the treated Murray River water leaves something to be desired until you get used to the taste and I am one of the people who find it too hard and too drying for my skin and a cause of eczema.

Adelaide’s local storm water has less inputs so surely can’t be all that difficult to clean up.

The great mystery is why we can have subsidies for rainwater tanks to water our gardens but we are not supposed to drink this water.  Having lived on rainwater as my only water supply for many years, I know how to use good gutter guard, filters before the water enters the tank and annual pump out of the bottom.

In my new house, which will be mine on FRIDAY!!!!!!!!, I am having rainwater tanks and plumbing them into my bathroom so I can shower and bath without getting eczema and I may even be tempted to drink some!

Sign up from a management system this week and you will be directly subsidizing either a rain water tank or a solar panel for my north facing roof.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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A river that supplies the north-east township of Royal George is contaminated with mine tailings and heavy metals and the local council is meeting to disuss how to cope with ongoing run-off from a disused mine site.

Households and farms draw water from the St Pauls River, although many surveyed It is also evident that groundwater in the general area is contaminated with dissolved heavy metals. The council has tested their water and found elevated levels of aluminium, cadmium, lead, copper, barium and arsenic.

Yesterday acting Greens leader and Lyons MHA Tim Morris demanded the EPA immediately step in and issue an Environmental Protection Notice.

He said “Once again we find the [State Policy on Water Quality Management] relegating the responsibility for safe drinking water back onto residents and local councils who do not have the expertise or funding to deal with serious water contamination.”

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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Victorian DPI are looking at the potential for aquaculture to become an extra use for the same water on the same farm and also add an extra income stream to that farm.

67% of Australian water is used by agriculture and 70% of that is in the Murray Darling Basin.  At present this water is only used once a the Primary Industries department is looking to use some of the large private water dams for aquaculture, their thinking being that if any nutrients are added to the water, it can be used by crops as the water is re-used.

They have done some small scale testing in open irrigation channels but as the flow in these is externally controlled this is a high risk location.  Also the water in the private dams has not previously been used.

Interesting concepts but I suspect not as simple as they envisage.  My experience of small scale aquaculture is that it is seldom very profitable.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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In most cases the huge amount of water coming to the surface with the coal seam gas is salty as well as being there in huge amounts.  There is real concern about the potential to pollute the aquifers and this is seriously concerning the farmers.

I must confess that I was very uneasy when I heard one mining industry spokesman saying that over the next 20-50 years technology will be developed to solve the problem of polluted aquifers!  Yoiks!  If I was in authority I would remove his licence immediately!!

This is a large and growing industry.  The first contracts to sell coal seam gas to the Chinese have already been signed and it is estimated that there will be around 20,000 wells.

We’ve seen what happened when gas escapes from oil wells.  What risks are there with gas wells?  Is there danger to the farmers?

How will this impact on the farms who actually own the land and who produce food and on the aquifers.

Perhaps we need to think about the priorities of our needs in this life – in which case I rate food and clean water a long way higher than energy and I would only allow the energy extraction if it can be done without compromising the production of food and retention of clean water.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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While BP is accepting responsibility for the massive oil cleanup of the US Gulf Coast they are also blaming the contractor that managed the oil platform.  Blame just tries to hide the truth that the person letting the contract is responsible for making sure the job is done safely.  Mistakes happen because the system is slack enough to allow them to in almost all cases.

If you employ contractors, you MUST manage them.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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Common sense at last I say!  Years ago when I was working as a marine biologist and collecting water samples from West Lakes and the Port River in Adelaide I was accosted by an irate woman with a wonderfully manicured lawn running down to the water’s edge.  She demanded to know what the government was going to do to stop the lake water going green which in her words was “disgusting”.  I complimented her on her garden and asked he how she managed to have such wonderful green lawn.  She started to explain the fertilizer and watering regime, then stopped as the penny dropped.  She suddenly asked, is all our fertilizer running off into the lake and causing the green?  The answer obviously is yes, coupled with the fact hat the stormwater in a city is the dog’s sewage system and as there are nearly as many dogs as people in most western cities this adds up.

Common sense for use of garden fertilizers which pollute the Swan and Canning river systems in Western Australia will be heavily restricted under tough new rules to be announced today.  Levels of phosphorus in domestic fertilizers will be halved to try to curb the 5.59 tonnes that flood into the Swan each year from home gardens.

It is understood vendors caught selling products that exceed the new levels would be penalised.

Excess phosphorus feeds algal blooms. When algae dies and decomposes, it starves the river of oxygen, in turn killing fish and marine life. The regulations will not apply to agricultural or horticultural use.

The amount of phosphorus in lawn fertilisers will be reduced from 3.5 per cent to 1 per cent, and garden fertilisers from 4 per cent to 2.5 per cent by 2011, then to 2 per cent by 2013 and fertiliser labelling will also be regulated to advise best-practice applications.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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Copper concentrate dust has been blowing straight into Darwin Harbour.  Copper is highly toxic to marine life  and the Northern Territory and the Government has issued a pollution abatement notice now so that  loading ships with copper concentrate can be halted immediately if dust escapes.

The pollution notice was issued to Oz Minerals, the company that sends the copper concentrate north from its Prominent Hill mine in South Australia to East Arm Wharf for export although the conveyor belt causing the spillage is owned by the Port Corporation, a Territory Government agency.

Work is hurriedly being carried out on the conveyor belt to prevent spillage and the belt will be run much slower than normal.  Environment Department officers will watch and film the loading and if running the conveyor belt slower avoids spillage then that speed would have to become the norm.

They are also testing the marine sediments and water quality for levels of copper, iron, manganese, arsenic and uranium plus air quality while ships ar being loaded.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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So what and why?  What are the issues?  Is it numbers, age distribution, location or what else is important?

The numbers are 22 million now and rising to somewhere between 25 and 36 million depending on which report you listen to.

This is an immensely complex area and while infrastructure was being mentioned in the news this morning, I haven’t heard too much about the environmental flow on effects and the limits of resources.

The world population is growing and one big result of that is more fighting over available resources.  This happens within countries and also when outside countries want the resources like oil.  Some even go to war for the right to be peaceful which seems peculiar until you realise that they are really fighting for the right to own the land – so it is resources again.

That is going to be the big issue in Australia.  We’ve got plenty of land but people all want to live on the best agricultural land and share the same infrastructure in that particular space.  Already we are importing large amounts of our seafood as stocks get lower and the recreational sector with larger voting power catch 50% of the fish caught.  Professional fishers are being pushed out of business -another example of resource limitation.

It is inevitable that people will come here and our migration will increase.

Heather Riddout, head of the Australian Industries Group pointed out that we actually need young migrants to address our aging population issue.  At present we have 5 tax payers for each aged person and without young migration or a massive birth-rate, by 2050 we will only have 2.5 tax payers per aged person.  This is certainly a serious issue as we all hate paying tax and this is also the root of the health debate as well.

Fine, but we need suitable infrastructure, water, food, energy, healthcare, waste management and transport.  I suspect we need new cities where there is water and agricultural land to feed people.  This is contrary to the trend we have had of reduction in the facilities in regional centres.

A very interesting development is the sea-change and tree-change phenomenon when retirees move to regional locations for a change of lifestyle.  They frequently object to local industry because they moved there for a peaceful lifestyle.  They also forget that in 5, 10 or so years, they will have increasing needs for medical help and this is less available in rural areas.  The changed house values restrict many of them from moving back to the cities for hospital treatment

Although many are very environmentally friendly in their motives, they do not understand how to minimise their footprint in their new location or the issues of living with minimal internet, only SWER power and providing their own water supply.  (SWER – single wire earth return and highly fluctuating in voltage in my experience.)

It is inevitable that people will come here and our migration will increase but the big issue is how we manage this so that we do minimise the impacts both on our environment and our lifestyle.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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I read this stat  today.  And believe it or not we are now building huge desalination plants so that we can burn fossil fuels in order to desalinate more water to go down the toilet!

And when you save water you also save energy, because water requires enormous amounts of energy to pump around the country and to dispose of.

In Hong Kong at least part of the city toilets are on a separate, unfiltered water supply.

Why can’t we use treated grey-water for toilet flushing?  It is legal in some places but not others.
There are some effective treatment systems for the grey water, because stored grey water can build up a high bacterial content.

Dual flush toilet cisterns have been around for many years but are still not universal.

Some places use stored rainwater to run the toilets and washing machine.

Coming from Adelaide, at the bottom end of the Murray, I treasure rainwater for drinking and bathing as Murray water causes my skin to get bad excema.

Clearly there needs to be clean gutters and sealed tanks that have the bottom 15 cms or so pumped out each year but there are increasing numbers of effective gutting solutions available now.  And some industrial areas may be unsuitable for rainwater collection for drinking.

I have twice lived in places with no water supply other than collected rain water and that is by far my favourite water resource.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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