Re: Show CRD the money (Our View, May 18)
The construction of land-based sewage treatment plants for Victoria will go down as one of the greatest environmental mistakes ever made.
After the order for the construction was given, 91 scientists, medical health officers and others wrote the minister of environment, saying that he did not have the evidence to justify it.
Not a single scientist or medical health officer involved in a generation of monitoring believes it is needed. There are no exceptions to that.
The order was based on a sentence in a report by others that was not taken from its conclusions. Indeed, that report does not recommend treatment and states “the benefits of treatment cannot be described with any precision,” but then they are not described at all.
The environmental health and safety costs of building and operating the plants – which can be estimated with precision – are ignored.
At about a billion dollars, including plant maintenance, it outmatches the Gomery affair by a wide margin.
Ted Dew-Jones
Victoria