Australian issues: A quick primer.

It is very interesting that Australia has been in the grips of a prolonged drought for 7 years now. Finally the politicians have realized we have a problem! Why? Because several major cities and towns are now on severe water restrictions. Toowoomba recently proposed the building of a world best practice re-cycling plant to return up to 25% of the waste water to one of the cities dams. The federal government in their wisdom decided it was a wonderful idea, but to look like they where concerned about community feelings they had a referendum. And got rolled!
Now we have a city with no water, in fact it is illegal to use water outside of the house now! Brisbane down the hill a bit, the capital of the state, the gold and sunshine coasts, (well over half the state population) are all on very strict limitations.
Add to that the fact that Australia, has failed to sign the much vaunted Kyoto protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emmissions, (although we produce less than 1%), and now we have a huge fight brewing over the governments floating the possibility of nuclear power. As a nation Australia has about 1/3 of all the worlds known uranium resources. The argument goes that if we sell it for producing power, (and we do), then we should value add and keep some money. If you are going to enrich it why not use it, and reduce our current reliance on coal!
There are many other projects to use solar, wind and water, but all are decades away from even marginal economic viability. The other issues include our reliance on digging finite resources out of the ground to pay for our standard of living. As Australia will receive both the first major, and worse effects of global warming, largely due to ice melt and climate change, this is an issue I watch fairly closely, and will continue to monitor. In the coming week our PM has called a water summit, which will be an interesting sight, as we have one party in nation government and another in all but one state! The possibility of constructive outcomes is therefore somewhat negated by political imperatives... Oh well. The more things change...

P.S. There are no citations or references in this post, as it is merely a state-of-play in my mind. As i delve into the issues I will supply supporting and corroborating evidence. One of my pet peeves in the WWW is the number of unsupported opinions...