Media Muddy the Water Debate

By Luntz, Stephen

Scientists are concerned that media reports have been stirring up rather than informing the public. Stephen Luntz reports. Leading scientists have criticised the quality of the debate about water issues facing Australia, as well as the possible solutions. “It is now apparent that any proposal to augment water supplies will cause an articulate interest group to form and seek to use the media either to block the proposal or to block it in their backyard,” said Peter Cullen, former Chief Executive of the Cooperative Research Centre for Freshwater Ecology. “Occasionally the media panders to these groups since a good barney makes for good media, but it hardly helps inform the community.”

Cullen was particularly critical of the coverage of the July 2006 referendum on the use of recycled water in Toowoomba, calling it “a disgrace…

No one was proposing to put sewage into drinking water. The proposal was for highly treated water, probably of better quality than found in many rivers, yet the language and the images of drinking from toilet bowls gave the media a field day and confused the public.”

Cullen is hardly alone in his view. Prof John Quiggin, an economist specialising in finding the best ways to allocate scarce water resources, described the ballot as one front in “the struggle of science against stupidity”. The proposal was defeated by a 62% vote against water recycling, leading to the scrapping of plans for a wider referendum across south-eastern Queensland. As a result, pressure has increased for other options such as the damning of the Traveston River, putting species such as the Mary River turtle at risk (AS, June 2007, pp. 36-37).

Commissioner of the NSW Natural Resources Commission, Dr John Williams, was softer in his language but no less concerned. “Some of the key issues for water reform have been lost in the recent debate,” Williams said. “In particular, overallocated rivers and groundwaters during a 50-year period of wet years must now have reduced extraction to address this overallocation in a drying period exacerbated by rising temperature and declining rainfall.”

Cullen and Williams were both responding to a Media Monitors report on water issues, which concluded: “Practical action to address Australia’s water crisis is being blocked by Federal-State politics, dead-locked in competing claims and counter-claims by vested interests and stymied by NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard).

“Numerous media reports on water feature state premiers criticising the Federal government and other states, advancing parochial interests and passing blame. On the other side, the Federal government is accused of seeking to usurp the power of the states and gain political advantage.

“While some media have devoted space and time to presenting the public with simply explained factual and scientific information on water usage, storage and management, the vast majority of debate and discussion is contradictory claims and counterclaims by various federal and state politicians, environmentalists, farmers’ groups and other vested interests such as landholders affected by proposed dams or residents potentially affected by infrastructure projects.”

The study reviewed more than 80,000 news reports, columns, letters to editors and feature articles run in mainstream media from 1 January to 30 April 2007, including in-depth analysis of 1200 of these. “There is surprisingly little coverage of domestic water- saving techniques, water tanks, more efficient irrigation and reducing industry’s use of water compared with coverage of the ‘big four’ – rivers, desalination, recycling and dams,” the report found.

According to report author Jim McNamara: “We weren’t surprised that there was a lot of political comment. That’s inevitable in a society like ours. However, we were surprised by the degree. The debate was dominated by politicians followed by interest groups such as farmers, with impartial commentary far behind.”

McNamara is particularly critical of cases where politicians made statements that were “simply not true” in support of their policy platforms. He singles out NSW Premier Morris lemma’s claim that “recycled water would contain sewage and you could taste it”.

Media Monitors recommends that the Federal government run a public education campaign explaining practical measures to manage and conserve water. “When the drought breaks and dams fill, many Australians will believe the water issue is resolved,” the report says, pointing out that government education campaigns in this area “pale into insignificance compared with the $40 million spent on communicating the first stage of WorkChoices alone”.

The failure to provide factual information is blamed on media enthusiasm for conflict and good images, but Prof Mike Young of Adelaide University says: “The strongest message that comes from the Media Monitors report is that the way to get ratings is to underpin political comment with scientific information about water. The public wants to know what the true costs and benefits are.”

The Australian Science Media Centre (ASMC) reports that there has been little media coverage of the Media Monitors report, or of the scientists’ responses. McNamara says it received a good response from scientists and organisations but media attention was sparse.

The later announcement of the Victorian Government’s decision to build Australia’s largest desalination plant provided an opportunity to do things better. The ASMC provided media outlets with a access to experts in the field, and its CEO, Dr Susannah Elliot, says the its web page on the announcement was far more intensively viewed than the one after the Media Monitors report. “The media doesn’t seem to like people gazing at their navel,” she said.

However, there was no consensus about the wisdom of the project among the experts. According to Prof Don Bursill, a water quality expert at the University of South Australia: “All major cities need to have a water strategy that involves a variety of different approaches. Melbourne is working hard to reuse its water, though they still have a long way to go. A desalination plant is a sensible approach as part of an overall strategy.”

On the other hand Dr Clive Hamilton of the Australia Institute was scathing. “We commissioned an analysis of the proposed desal plant in Sydney, just looking at the volume of greenhouse gases it would generate over its lifetime, and it is huge. Water shortages are caused in large measure by climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions, so our solution is to create more greenhouse gas emissions. It’s just astonishing really.”

A/Prof Greg Leslie of the UNESCO Centre for Membrane Technology at the University of NSW took an intermediate position. “I’m not against desal, but they have to ensure that the water that’s produced by desalination is adequately recycled. Melbourne has one of the lowest recycling rates in Australia but it already has all the infrastructure needed to recycle water, so they need to make sure that recycled water is substituted for potable water in order to conserve their water use.

“Desalination is not a panacea to the drought,” Leslie continued. “All water, be it stormwater, groundwater, wastewater or surface water, should be treated as a valuable resource that should be recycled to the fullest extent possible.”

Australia’s first large-scale desalination plant opened at Kwinana near Perth in November 2006. It supplies 130 million litres per day, one-sixth of Perth’s water consumption.

Copyright Control Publications Pty Ltd Sep 2007

(c) 2007 Australasian Science. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.