Where did all Melbourne's water go?

38%!! Bizarrely, I am so excited that Melbourne's water storage levels are back above the 1/3 of capacity mark for the first time in ages. But the situation deserves an economist's eye methinks...


If you think I can rant about the dodgy nature of Melbourne's toll roads and speeding taxes, don't even get me started on the water situation in Australia's fastest growing city (1800 new residents a week according to The Age last weekend).

Expect a Michael Moore documentary at some stage on the collusion between Victoria's state government and the desalination industry that has led us (via corporate wankerism and short term political cycles) through utter political brinksmanship to the edge of a crisis where the only solution has become vast water projects.

Any planner would have to be blind(folded) to not see the correlation between Melbourne's population growth and the decline in our water stored in the city's dams and reservoirs. Instead, playing to our bleeding heart environmental psyches, the blame has fallen on the uncontrollable 'global climate change problem'. "No incompetence to see here Mr Public, it's all the fault of that dreadful climate change bogeyman".

First step: prepare to be sobered up and go to this page on the Melbourne Water website to see for yourself how the trend has been in water storage since 1997. Great interactive graph - static version above. Ugly situation indeed.

Let's see what the Bureau of Meterology have to say about the long term rainfall trends for Melbourne. Always ups and downs basically, although the worst time in history has definitely been the last decade.

Plenty of websites will confirm we have had a drought since 1997 . Is that to blame? Well, certainly - less inflows means an inevitable decline in water levels.

But how have we been growing our storage facilities over the last 3 decades to cope with the completely predictable (compared to weather forecasting that is) influx of immigrants like me? Storage in lakes? Storage in urban reservoirs? Stormwater storage in the monumental new suburbs going up on Melbourne's outskirts? Water tanks? Conservation programs?

Checking out this page on Melbourne Water's site I think we see the culprit - the dreaded 'corporatisation' starts to occur in the 1990s:

1991: The Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works merged with a number of smaller urban water authorities to form Melbourne Water.

1994: Three years later, the Victorian Government announced that Melbourne Water was going to be divided into three retail water companies and a wholesale water company.

The only 'new' storage construction I can see on this timeline since bureaucratisation is the celebrated reconnection of the Tarago Reservoir in 2009, the closure of which was the first act of the new-born Melbourne Water organisation 15 years earlier.

The timeline is full of money invested in strategies and action plans, campaigns and buzzwords, retreats and think-tanks, call centres and quality assurance programs, millions was spent on computer billing systems, advertising and bugger all done to actually store more water.

I guess they all really missed having Wikipedia back in the 1990s. The planners and politicians just needed this graph on their wall to jolly along their water resource strategy thingo.

Turn it 90 degrees to the right and it bears an uncanny resemblance to our declining water levels in the dams.