A Department of Infrastructure and Planning seminar in Brisbane today entitled “Securing Our Water Future” could have been an opportunity to honestly assess the alternatives in a time of great economic and environmental change.

That it is not speaks volumes for how we have arrived in the present mess of climate change and collapsing world economies.

The house of cards, which seemingly only yesterday was being described as the golden age of economic prosperity, was constructed off the back of a lack of basic honesty and due prudence. The belief in a lie allowed a level of confidence that was seriously misplaced and sucked everything into its vortex.

While the focus in the past two weeks has been on the state of the banking sector, it will eventually switch to other publicly listed companies that have seen their intrinsic values eroded by the demands of the stock market for greater profits.

The quest to satisfy the short-term demands of a needy market has brought a style of management that values nothing but its quarterly reporting data and which has justified the stripping of human capital, corporate knowledge and product values.

What, ultimately, has anything stood for in an age where executives are paid obscene amounts of money, line managers are motivated fundamentally by the carrot of bonuses for meeting increasingly unrealistic profit targets, and those on the shop floor are seen as just another cost that needs to be diminished?

It was, to use the buzzword of the new millennium, an unsustainable paradigm.

Today’s Department of Infrastructure seminar is a farce because it has nothing to do with “Securing Our Water Future” and everything to do with justifying a strategy whose end plan was to privatise water supply.

The Queensland government has always overstated the “water crisis” in south-east Queensland. The water commission’s worst-case consumption levels still allow 140 litres per day per person with a long-term goal of 200 litres a day.

No one was going to die of thirst.

So why the rush to commit billions of dollars for the Traveston Crossing dam, the headlong leap into desalination and the trampling of property rights to get pipes into the ground if not to create an entity to be sold off at short-term benefit to the state’s coffers?

At 11am today Graeme Newton of Queensland Water Infrastructure will deliver a paper entitled “Traveston Dam, A Sustainable Option’’.

In fact, the entire program is littered with the delivery of papers that justify just one course of action. No alternative views will be considered.

But there are alternative views on how best to deliver water security.

Environmental scientist Robert Hales, in a series of insightful papers on the Traveston dam (see http://roberthales.squarespace.com/robert-hales/), argues that based on current SEQ water strategy estimates the dam would not be needed before 2028.

With a 50% take up of rainwater tanks the need would not be there before 2038 and with a 100% take up not before 2042.

Here on the Coast climate change adaptation professor Peter Waterman and environmental scientist Justin Holbrook have both said decentralisation of key infrastructure was the key to successfully surviving the future.

They argue a strategy that would make the Coast a model for water sustainability by trading each kilolitre of water from our dams for a kilolitre of rainwater harvesting capacity.

As an area of high rainfall we could water-proof this region into the future without the need for centralised water monopolies and the high-energy costs associated with pumping it all over south-east Queensland, a cost – despite having water on tap here – we would be expected to share with the growth corridors of Ipswich and greater Brisbane. That is one idea that won’t be discussed at today’s talkfest.

According to Mr Hales, rainwater tanks – which he estimates emit half the carbon of the dam and five times less than that emitted by desalination plants – have been sidelined on the basis of an inept study of the performance of three household rainwater tanks.

In his paper entitled Underestimation of Climate Change, Carbon and Alternatives in Supplementary Report for the EIS, he argues that the QWC has used a model that puts the energy efficiency of rainwater tanks in their worst light as a means of rejecting them as an alternative.

Hales says the selective use of experts and the compartmentalising of their contribution would “methodologically justify construction of a house of cards in the face of an approaching cyclone’’.

Economically and environmentally with markets and nature clearly under more stress than can be borne, surely it’s time to turn away from houses of cards built on the quick sand of waste and greed.