This time it is not politics.

It's science . . . now isn't that exciting?

The reason an electric toaster doesn't  stay down when you push the spring down, without the power being on is?.

Electromagnetism.  Easily proved.

Thank you Michael Faraday.

You may have never heard of this amazing person

He is bigger than Bradman.

This is what is called fact.

  Easily reproducible, easily proved.

Facts are facts. There are no alternative facts,

And strangely, science is the first to say "We don't know".

George Harley

Mount Isa

Upon attending a meeting of the Great Artesian Basin Draft Water Plan last week, I came away more distressed about the future of the GAB. This meeting was very poorly attended, due to lack of effective advertisement. 

The hydrologists go to great length to explain the current and future of the GAB using figures that could only be described as rubbery.

If pressed, they admit that much of what they are presenting as fact, is really conjecture and “educated guesses”. 

I noted with alarm that the CSG and mining industry have unlimited access to the water from the GAB and perform their own monitoring of water usage, reporting the results back to government. I may be slightly cynical, but to me this is akin to leaving the fox in charge of the hen house.

We were also informed that the CSG industries “treat” the waste water and then pump it back down into the aquafers.

There is no long-term science to uncover the ramifications of such a treasonable act, but for the sake of expediency the Queensland Government has given the greenlight and turned a blind eye.

The meeting also informed us that there is a 90,000ml wastage of water from the GAB from stock and domestic water usage and the Queensland Government wants to further reduce this. I challenged this figure wanting to know how did they arrive at such a number, when a great many of the bores that are still left flowing (174 in Queensland) have never even been visited by a Hydrologist in the lifetime of theses bores, and many of these have been down for over 100 years. Once again, the answer was based upon assumed rates of flow.

I am concerned by any wastage of water, but it seems pitiful considering the CSG companies poisoning the water through their activities and being left to perform their own monitoring. According to the hydrologists, current water being used for stock and domestic, is having nil effect on the GAB. There seems to be a great anomaly occurring within the government departments. On one hand, there is open slather of water wastage and contamination for the CSG industry, yet further water restriction protocols being pushed upon agriculture for stock water.

When did water, the most precious commodity that sustains life, become so unimportant and is deemed by the resource industries as a “waste product”, be allowed to be treated with such contempt? We all know who owns these CSG companies, and it isn’t Australians. The future of our GAB which allows life to grow in one of the driest countries on earth, being left for foreign multinationals to treat with such disdain, after all, they don’t live here, and, all they are interested in, is profits.

When will we wake up! Water is the substance of life, and what is happening to our GAB and associated aquifers through CSG mining is one of the greatest moral issues of our time.

Tricia Agar,

Barbara Plains,

Wyandra