By Mel Cameron

A CORPORATE-government conglomerate in the so-called ‘Smart State’ of Queensland, Australia, plans subject some three million citizens to a dangerous experiment that will inject so-called purified sewage directly into a dam supplying household water.

Against the wishes of residents and ignoring the most basic law of hygiene to separate human bodily waste from food and water, the government will conduct the experiment in league with multinational water corporations including Veolia Water and Haliburton subsidiary Kellog Brown Root (KBR).

The bureaucrats says it’s safe because it’s been happening in western Sydney for 17 years, where waste water is dumped into the Richmond River and used again 17km downstream by another community. In London, where this also happens, there is an alarming rise in male infertility and breast development.

The difference is that Queensland, Australia, will use a closed system, where so-called ‘purified recycled water’ is continually pumped back into the water grid.

The bureaucrats and CEOs have chosen to ignore the advice of people like Professor Don Bursill, the Adelaide scientist who developed Australia’s drinking water guidelines, who says he would not drink recycled sewage and neither will he back its use. Professor Bursill says there are too many risks attached to the practice for it to be introduced here.

And then there’s Professor Steven Oppenheimer, Director of the Centre of Cancer and Development Biology, California State Northbridge University, who says: “The World’s Scientific Community does not and will not know all the toxic agents and carcinogens that may be able to make it through the indirect reclaimed water process to drinking water. Also, there is simply no technology to detect them.”

But money speaks louder than reason for the bureaucrats and multinationals. The state government of Queensland contracted to build the multi-billion-dollar water grid based on the ‘sustainable’ model of water supply promoted by UNESCO that insists all waste water should be ‘purified’ and recycled back into the system. This is the same UNESCO that advocates ‘population control’. One would have to wonder if waste water recycling was ultimately designed to serve that purpose.

Meanwhile, Queensland the ‘Smart State’ has moved for the wholesale adoption of the UN’s Agenda 21 program. The water grid fits into the South East Queensland Regional Plan covering the state’s capital city Brisbane and the nearby coastal Gold Coast city. The regional plan is an Agenda 21 template designed to impose UN-style economic and social programs upon every person and organization.

For Veolia, which will also pump desalinated water into the system, this ‘integrated water system’ will mean the ability to earn millions of dollars out of sewage, to which it will ‘add value’ in the form of ‘purified recycled wastewater’ or PRW as the bureaucrats like to call it.

Veolia will take the a ghastly cocktail of human waste including faeces, urine and blood containing pharmaceuticals, hormones and various disease pathogens and put it through a seven-stage so-called purification process of microfiltration, disinfection and gamma ray treatment. The dried solid matter, meanwhile, will be processed and sold as ‘ecological’ fertilizer or some such tag.

The government crows that it’s seven-barrier system will get ‘almost everything’ out of the waste water. Well that’s fine, but send it on down to the ocean where natural processes over time in vast amounts of salt water and sunlight will hopefully break down what little remains. Instead, this ‘purified’ waste will go into the state’s biggest dam that will supply the state’s two biggest cities with domestic water.

Meanwhile the people of Queensland have not been a prone to the levels of UNESCO-induced recycling mania as the bureaucrats and corporate chiefs.

Two years ago the Queensland Government decided to hold a referendum to test public opinion on setting up a waste water recycling plant for the city of Toowoomba and region (pop. 60,000). Bureaucrats spent an estimated $1 million to call in celebrities, run television campaigns, let people taste ‘recycled’ water samples and so on in order to convince them of the ‘wisdom’ of their plan.

The Federal Government meanwhile, promised to pour $23 million into the recycling scheme if the residents voted in favor. But the campaign flopped dismally, with 61 per cent of people saying ‘no’.

Funny how common sense can sometimes overrule the dazzling ‘solutions’ of corporate-sponsored science.

The campaign run by the bureaucrats and their corporate backers made some shocking errors that demonstrated the shoddy science on which the whole notion of recycling sewage is based.

Early on a ‘Pure H2O’ campaign was launched, claiming the UNESCO-backed reverse osmosis technology allowed ‘only water molecules to pass through the treatment machinery’. The local Toowoomba City Council published information supporting this erroneous notion.

However, the information was later changed to show ‘small organic molecules’ passing through barrier membranes. Opponents maintained that small amounts of anything contained in the source sewage water could pass through the system. Proponents retreated to the position that you would have to drink unrealistically huge amounts of the water for any significant accumulation of chemicals of concern to occur in the body – the same argument they use for fluoridation.

Was it any wonder that local food industries in the region politely requested alternative supplies of water if the referendum said yes? No doubt the food manufacturers are well aware that Middle Eastern cultures would not countenance the idea of human waste going anywhere near the water supply.

And then there was the problem of proteins call prions, that are associated with BSE (mad cow disease) that can be passed into sewage from humans. The knowledge of this caused the Australian Red Cross to ban blood donors from the UK. The recycling opponents pointed out no data were available to estimate the amount of prion material in sewage wastewater as they simply did not test for it.

“While the risk of prion transmission by potable water re-use may be considered small, the fatal nature of this illness and limitations on current knowledge means that concerns cannot be entirely dismissed,’’ they said.

Fears were further raised when it found the ‘benchmark’ National Waste Water Study for Australia had only one page on microbiological studies which recycling opponents said was ‘dismally void of any medical or scientific data’.

After the folk of Toowoomba and district rejected recycled sewage in their water, hand-wringing among the bureaucrats, ‘scientific experts’ and others started in earnest.

Some notable whining came from Associate Professor Greg Leslie, from the UNESCO Centre for Membrane Science and Technology, University of New South Wales. This professor has worked worldwide on various water reuse projects, including as a deputy program manager in California and as lead process designer in Singapore.

“What we need to do is make sure that when the next vote comes along there’s a more informed debate,” whined the UNESCO-sponsored professor.

“The reality is that the residents of Toowoomba have just said ‘no’ to the best quality water in the country. The filtration process is state of the art and leaves the water cleaner and with less chemicals than in most drinking water. Recycling water essentially drought proofs a city.’’

The demonstration of democracy was not enough for former Smart State premier Peter Beattie who quickly moved in January 2007 to simply negate his former promises to hold a state-wide referendum on the issue.

The courts are now the only remaining course of action for the people of Queensland who wish to keeping drinking water harvested in accordance with at least some laws of nature.