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More Queenslanders than residents of any other state are worried that there may not be a secure supply of water, according to a report by the Australian Water Association.
"They just don't think we will have enough water for the longer-term," Daniel Lambert from Arup Australia - a member of the Australia Water Association - said in the Australian Water Outlook report presented at the World Water Congress in Brisbane on Wednesday.
And 77 per cent of the community was prepared to drink recycled water.
Queenslanders also worry they are paying too much for their drinking water, according to their water bills, he said.
Overall, 44 per cent of people said their water bills had increased since last year.
The AWA's Australian Water Outlook highlights that only 29 per cent of Queenslanders felt that Australia had secure reserves of water, compared with the national average of 36 per cent.
It took the water views of 2500 people Australia-wide.
More Queenslanders – 68 per cent – were also "not very confident", or "not at all" confident that planners had water security issues under control, more than the national average of 62 per cent.
More Queenslanders (11 per cent) than the rest of the country (7 per cent) thought water prices on their water bills were too high.
Two serious floods in 2011 and 2013 were preceded by one of the worst droughts in the state's history with water supply in south-east Queensland dams dipping below 20 per cent for the first time.
Much of Queensland, west of the Great Divide, is still in drought.
"Millennium droughts" during the 2000s prompted a $9 billion Water Grid stretching pipelines and water treatment plants from the Sunshine Coast to the Gold Coast and from Brisbane west to Toowoomba.
However, the value of that $9 billion infrastructure was not fully realised when dams were full and questions over the Gold Coast desalination plant remained.
"It could be that the desalination plant has not operated at its full capacity," Mr Lambert said.
He said water issues were either a "front page issue" during drought or floods, or a "back page issue" when no national emergency loomed.
Mr Lambert said problems for water security were short-term political cycles (three to four-year terms) and government-owned water utilities, which planned only five years ahead.
"(Water) utilities have a lot of focus on the short-term," he said.
He said most were pressured by governments into maximising returns to their government owners rather than committing to long-term strategic planning.
Mr Lambert said engineering consults Arup, which produced the report, also considered young adult Queenslanders – those aged between 18 and 30 – shielded from the worst impacts of the Millennium Drought events of the early 2000s.
He said they were now noticing the scale of water bills for the first time, boosting the number of Queenslanders concerned at costs.
"Eighteen to 30-year-old know a lot less about the cost of water," Mr Lambert suggested.
He said they were children during the drought and a higher percentage now lived in apartments, where the body corporate received their water bill, not individual unit owners.
"And more of them now live at home and don't pay an individual water bill themselves."
Successive Queensland governments have struggled to put together a coherent water strategy for south-east Queensland and the responsibility has been taken by the South East Queensland Council of Mayors.
Fairfax Media reported the most recent funding option to begin a co-ordinated $500 million revegetation of the Brisbane River, where a $2 a night "tourist levy" was being considered.
Mr Lambert said it was a common complaint of water associations that it was very hard to get any government or strategic planning organisations to comment on similar projects in Australia.
He described a $500 million idea to build a pipeline from Wentworth to Broken Hills in New South Wales, which is in the wilderness after NSW electricity asset sales were axed.
"We are finding some of those interesting funding models need a boost to get some of these projects off the ground."
