April 24, 2009 12:01am
THE deteriorating state of the Murray Darling Basin can now be monitored by everyone online.
Climate Change and Water Minister Penny Wong today unveiled a website to track the state of water storages across the Murray Darling Basin (MDB).
The data on public and private storages is already collected by the Murray Darling Basin Authority, but Senator Wong said putting this information online was important to cut through inaccurate information running through public debates.
"We think it's very important with the issue of water being front and centre for so many people, particularly, that we have as much factual information available as we are able," she said.
"We are facing real and substantial challenges in the MDB. Our job as a government is to do two things: to try to improve the health of the rivers . . . by purchasing and investing in water savings and the second is to try and make our irrigation industries more efficient.
"We face a generational challenge here, (and it is important that) we have a discussion that is based on fact so people know it is what government and the community are dealing with and there can be an informed discussion about the way forward."
"I hope this information will make clear what is happening and ensure we have a good basis for discussion about the way forward."
The website, at www.mdba.gov.au/water/waterinstorage, shows the entire basin contained only 17 per cent of its 22,621 Gl storage today.
The troubled Lower Lakes contained just 687 Gl of its 2015Gl capacity, based on 117 years of data.
The data does not show delivery water – additional water required to bring it into the Lakes – or evaporation losses.
Senator Wong was less forthcoming about the treatment of water security issues in next month's Federal Budget.
"We have made a commitment on the $12.9 billion and that commitment has been very clear from the election and from our first budget.
"In relation more broadly to Budget matters, I don't intend to engage in any Budget speculation."
She dismissed recent reports showing an increase in the Antarctic ice sheet as disproving climate change.
"The reports I've read show it is a pattern of Antarctic ice and while some parts of Antarctica appears to be experiencing some increase in ice coverage, there's also a decrease in other parts.
"This needs further research . . . but the consensus of science is that climate change is happening and that human activity is contributing to it."
"It is time for us to get on with acting and we will do that by passing the legislation the government will bring forward this year."
Going, going gone? The 150-year-old Williamstown dwelling. Photo: Wayne Taylor
A RAMSHACKLE mess in Williamstown is the centre of a bitter conservation row because it is thought to date from 1842, making it possibly Melbourne's oldest house. It is also on a prime development site and has an owner who needs to sell to prop up his dwindling superannuation.
The weatherboard house, which has been unoccupied since at least the early 1960s, was listed in 2007 by Heritage Victoria on its heritage register after considerable debate.
This makes it technically one of the state's most significant buildings. But the owner, Hoppers Crossing man Gary Page, said he had been told as little as $10,000 would be available as a grant from the State Government to restore it, despite an estimate that proper repairs would cost $200,000.
The 839-square-metre block has been estimated by the real estate agents who want to sell it to be worth about $1 million.
The property has been in the Page family since 1964, when Mr Page's father bought it as a storage site for his oil drum recycling business. Mr Page, who has owned it since 1981, has applied to Heritage Victoria to demolish the structure before the land is sold at auction, but he said yesterday he was happy to donate the house to anyone who wanted to take it away for restoration.
There have also been suggestions the house could be moved to parkland and restored as a museum, but there has been little enthusiasm from Hobsons Bay Council and no offer of money.
Patsy Toop, president of the community group Preserve Old Williamstown, says the house should be preserved on its current site as a national monument. "This cottage represents the first settlement in Melbourne. Before it was built, more than likely there would have been tents. In America, Europe or England, remnants of first settlement are made national monuments."
But while Victoria's National Trust believes owners of such buildings should be given much more financial assistance to preserve them, its senior historian, Celestina Sagazio, said there was not enough evidence that this was Melbourne's oldest house. She said there had been considerable debate in Heritage Victoria before the building was finally listed on its register. "What we do know is that the block was first gazetted in 1837. Its first owner was a James Cain who bought it in 1841 and then sold it to William Pope in 1842," she said.
"The first reference to a house on the site was the first local council rate book of 1856, which said there was a four-room timber dwelling occupied by Clara Pope, the widow of William Pope."
Mr Page said he did not want to see history destroyed. "Someone suggested it should just catch fire, but I don't want that to happen. I have been approached by someone who wants to restore the building, and if I get a demolition permit I will let him take it."
He said he was retired and living on superannuation. The imperative to sell had resulted from the decline in his super due to the economic downturn.
"I offered it to the council to rent it as parkland, but they rejected the idea, so here I am getting no rent and having to pay big rates on it each year."
Don't you wish you had your own kitchen PC?
Forget the dusty old desktop in the study and the derelict laptop in the cupboard. The benchtop is the inspiration behind a new class of computer that promises to pipe Facebook and YouTube directly to your kitchen.
Officially named the all-in-one PC, this category of computer combines a lightweight LCD screen and processor in one slim form factor.
What makes it far friendlier for busy hands than a traditional computer is that it can be operated primarily via touchscreen, with large tabs for easy browsing embedded into the user interface.
This is the killer feature says Dell, which plans to ship its new Studio One touchscreen range here early next month.
Evan Williams, general manager for consumer sales, says that now wireless networks are more common among home computer users, people are thinking more critically about how they access the internet in their home.
"Customers are asking for a touchscreen device that is always on. They want to quickly touch Google maps, quickly type in the address they are going to, and then walk out the door.
"They want to do that outside the traditional home office room and in the living area or kitchen," he says.
With fewer features than traditional PCs and scaled-down performance, these devices are not designed to act as the central home computing hub, but rather as a secondary PC for a family room or kitchen.
Asus has been selling its 4.3-kilogram Eee Top for $1299 in Australia since February and, like Dell, is targeting the device at communal living areas in the home.
MSI has also recently announced a new model called the Wind Top AE1900, but is yet to flesh out prices or local distribution plans, while Dell's range will cost between $1700 and $2000.
Tracy Tsai, a PC analyst at Gartner, says that at a cost of between $1000 and $2000, there is still a way to go before all-in-one PCs are widely embraced by consumers.
"During a recession a secondary PC will not be considered a must-have item for many families. The cost needs to fall below $US500 ($700) for many people to feel comfortable with this purchase," she says.
To attract mainstream interest, she believes devices should have an effective LCD touchscreen, WiFi connectivity, instant on/off function, low power consumption and a TV tuner.
Design is also an important ingredient given the prominent location of these units.
Asus and MSI have adopted sleek, shiny finishes somewhat reminiscent of ultra-modern white goods, while Dell has gone the extra mile with fabric panels in a range of colours.
But kitchen designer Jenny James is sceptical that glossy exteriors and clever marketing tactics will be enough to breathe life into the kitchen PC concept.
"When you are in the kitchen it's a workplace - albeit a fun workplace - and no one I know considers this environment conducive to visual based activities like watching TV or using a computer. Even those that like to download recipes from the internet tend to do this away from the kitchen," she says.
Although she sees an obvious role for computers in other living areas of the house, juggling the device alongside other kitchen appliances may prove more a gimmick than a reality, she concludes.
In a blink ... 330kmh AVE trains are booming in popularity.
Taking a high-speed train to the Costa del Sol might save a marriage or two, writes Justin Wastnage.
I can admit to a touch of schadenfreude as I eased back in my chair, trying to contain my laughter. In a swanky bar in the upscale Spanish resort town of Marbella, a friend was recounting his wife's recent divorce threat.
He had chosen to drive from Madrid to the Costa del Sol, while I had opted for the new Alta Velocidad Espanola (AVE) high-speed Spanish train. With a scarred memory of tortoise-like Australian trains, he'd opted for the hare option of a rental car. Sadly for him, the tortoise has overtaken the hare in Spain, with a whole batch of 330kmh trains on new lines opening in the past few years, replacing the slow, shuddering rolling stock of yesteryear.
Spain is taking its high-speed trains very seriously, with an ambitious plan to overtake France in high-speed track by next year and to build an AVE station near to where nine in 10 Spaniards live by 2020. Lines into France and Portugal are also on the cards.
Iberia, the national airline, has almost pulled out of the Madrid to Barcelona route since the AVE arrived last year, with its ability to complete the 630-kilometre journey in 2 1/2 hours.
Speed aside, there are other things going for the train. My friend had romantic ideas of navigating the fabled land of windmills that Cervantes so famously made of La Mancha in Don Quixote. Instead, he found himself, accompanied by an ever-less understanding wife, driving through landscapes resembling the Western Plains of NSW.
Brown mountains give way every so often to vivid diagonal patches of verdant agriculture marking out a valley or other water source. Utes drive back and forth shuttling farmers between the olive groves and Rioja wineries, their drivers immune from the sun beating down on them.
This is gripping stuff for the first 20 minutes in my air-conditioned train, zipping along silently through the countryside, and an idle distraction from the newspapers for a further hour. In the car, however, it was a different tale. Tedium set in less than 50 kilometres from Madrid, my friend reported, and Spanish commercial radio reception was lost at the 100-kilometre mark. The driver tuned to AM radio; his wife tuned out.
Not that I needed much distraction; a full meal is free in first class. In truth, I have had better Spanish meals and much better Spanish wine but there is still something eminently civilised about having proper crockery to eat from and proper cutlery, rather than the airline-issue plastic.
Favourable comparisons with air travel are easy to make: Madrid's Atocha station is in the CBD and, although not as modern as the city's new airport, is a fascinating place to while away the hours, especially since its grand building has been converted into a tropical greenhouse.
Sadly, the station was the site of Europe's worst terrorist atrocity when an al-Qaeda splinter group killed 191 people in March 2004 using a series of bomb attacks on commuter trains. The memorial is a stark, modernist, glass tubular sculpture connecting the train station with the city life above, as the bomb attacks did.
A consequence is airport-style X-ray scanners are required before boarding, unlike much of the rest of Europe's high-speed network. But security is a small price to pay for a system so punctual that delays of more than five minutes result in an automatic full refund.
It was a good 90 minutes into the journey before the landscape changed in any meaningful way. The red, arid plains of the interior started giving way to the craggy mountains of Andalusia. As the city of Cordova looms into view, I get a glimpse of the Islamic architecture from the Caliphate period of Arab rule over Spain in the middle of the last millennium. The architecturally impressive train station is hidden from most of the old quarter of the city, which is the largest UNESCO-protected World Heritage urban site.
From here, the train continues its rapid descent into the Costa del Sol, a coastline synonymous to many British ears with Gold Coast-style hellraising holidays and cheap resorts. In truth, while there are pockets of the Costa in which high-rise condominiums dominate, much of it remains authentic Andalusian. The director of tourism for the Costa del Sol, Salvador Pendon, says Australians are mainly drawn in by the coast's abundance of well-manicured golf courses and famous whitewashed villages in the mountains.
Our terminus is in the port city of Malaga and to reach the impressive Maria Zambrano station (the philosopher was chosen ahead of Antonio Banderas as Malaga's most famous citizen) we squeeze between the city's two rivers.
Ave means bird in Spanish and as our own AVE swooped down gently on our terminus, we arrived relaxed and refreshed. It took quite a few drinks to make my mate feel the same way about his journey. Threatened with a solo journey on the return, he dropped the rental car off in Malaga and booked a ticket on the AVE for the return to Madrid.
Church worker Susan Boyle sings on Britain's Got Talent.
A frumpy 47-year-old Scottish charity worker who has never had a boyfriend has become an unlikely YouTube sensation, after her stunning weekend musical debut on a British television talent show.
By Wednesday the clip of Susan Boyle - whose dowdy appearance drew sniggers when she walked on stage on ITV's "Britain's Got Talent", saying she dreamed of emulating West End star Elaine Page - had been viewed 5.7 million times.
When she began to sing, the panel of three judges led by music guru Simon Cowell was visibly shocked, and the audience in Glasgow rose to its feet, as her voiced soared through "I Dreamed A Dream" from "Les Miserables".
"Without a doubt that was the biggest surprise I have had in three years of this show," said judge Piers Morgan, admitting that before her performance "everyone was laughing at you".
"No-one is laughing now. That was stunning."
Boyle, from West Lothian, who says she has never been on a date or been kissed, now is the favourite to win the show - drawing comparisons with Paul Potts, an opera-singing mobile phone salesman who won in 2007.
Potts went on to have number-one albums in 15 countries.
Posts
All Comments
