CONTENTS

Introduction
Sewers seaward
Toothless watchdog
Toxic fish
Sewer-side surfing
Public relations battle
Events of 1989
Beyond Sydney
Conclusion
Bibliography

Continuing to Mislead

Even after all this the Water Board continued to mislead the public and the media. At first a Board spokesman (a scientist) had assured the Herald that the Board no longer indulged in secrecy, although it had been part of the Board’s policy.

 ‘In the past there were problems. The Board was run by engineers. That is no longer the situation. Yes, perhaps there was too much secrecy. No, not secrecy. It just never occurred to them to let the public know. All that has changed now.’ (Herald, 7/1/89)

But what in fact had changed? A few days after this statement had been made Alan Tate asked a senior Board scientist whether figures given by the Board for concentrations of toxic substances in discharged effluent in one of their recent reports included the toxic substances in sludge, which was also discharged into the ocean. He was told by this scientist that of course they did: ‘You don’t think I would 1et them be published if the sludge was not included, do you?’ I attempted to prove to Tate that this was a lie, after which he made further enquiries at the Board. He was told by a puzzled public relations officer that the Board’s engineers were rushing around in a panic and that the Board was in a state of chaos. The next day the same scientist admitted that the sludge figures had not actually been included in the report and that ‘an honest mistake’ had been made in telling Tate otherwise.

That same week Ian Wallis of Caldwell Connell came to Sydney and the Board invited Herald journalists Tate and Bailey to a private meeting with him. Tate claimed that virtually everything Wallis said during that meeting ‘was useless as far as reporting the issues at hand’. Bailey said that if they had reported the meeting they would have reported Wallis’s admission that further treatment should be investigated eventually for the ocean outfalls. Yet many Water Board people were incensed that Wallis, the expert, did not receive any coverage in the Herald and took this as a further sign that the Herald was biased and was conducting some sort of vendetta against them.

The relationship between be Board and the Herald’s key sewage pollution investigators continued to deteriorate. In a subsequent screaming match between Tate and the Water Board’s public relations manager, the latter alleged that Bailey had admitted in the meeting with Wallis that he had no under- standing of how the extended ocean outfalls worked and hadn’t realised the complexity involved. Tate denied this but the same story was reported in the Board’s internal magazine, Aquarian, except that it referred to Tate as be one who had admitted not understanding the project. Tate was incensed but no doubt it did wonders for the morale of Water Board employees, who felt besieged by the Herald.

In the meantime the Board had given Tate some figures for concentrations of toxic substances in sludge but in a form that was difficult to interpret. I studied the figures comparing them to other information I had and decided they were not credible, but I was unable to prove them false since I did not have access to recent, more reliable figures. Finally the SPCC admitted that they didn’t require the Board to monitor the sludge for toxics and the Board’s monitoring manager was reported as saying that the Board did not know much about the concentration of toxic material in sludge discharged through its outfalls. ‘We have started looking at this in the past few weeks’, he said (Herald, 17/1/89).

The Herald article had also pointed out the problems that sludge discharges had caused in other parts of the world and the dangers it posed to marine life. The next day the Minister for Environment, Tim Moore, announced that the SPCC would investigate alternative methods for disposing of sludge. Moore claimed that turning the Water Board around was like trying to turn around the battleship USS Missouri. ‘But there is a changing ethos within the Board from being an engineering construction concern to something that is an environmentally concerned organisation’ (Herald, 18/1/89).

But the Board was set in its ways. At the beginning of March 1989, the Board was finding the only defence it had concerning accusations about fish contamination was the new trade waste policy. Wanting the policy to seem tougher than it actually was, the Board placed a full-page advertisement in the Herald (4/3/89), that claimed that 70 per cent of the volume of industrial discharge that might contain damaging wastes had been controlled by their policy. This meant that ‘this waste may no longer be discharged to the sewers or drains’. Such a statement was patently untrue. Neither the 70 per cent of industrial discharge nor the damaging wastes were prevented from entry into the sewers under the trade waste policy (see chapter 3 pp. 65). Although it had got away with such misleading advertising in the past, things had changed. The Board was forced to admit shortly afterwards that the advertisement was ‘certainly ambiguous’ and ‘should be clarified’ (Herald, 7/3/89).

This admission came shortly after a former public relations manager of the Board, Sandy Thomas, went to the papers with his story. He accused the Board of ‘grossly unethical’ cover-ups on beach pollution. Thomas’ claims about how the Board had changed since his employment there make ironic reading, given the long history of deception which the Board had indulged in. ‘Quite simply,’ he said, ‘the Water Board can no longer be trusted on these issues.’

One of his claims was that the Board had inflated the cost of secondary treatment, something relevant to the immediate debate. People had begun to demand secondary treatment. A Herald poll showed that 86 per cent of Sydney people of all ages and political persuasions, and both sexes, felt that Sydney’s beaches were more polluted than they had been in the past and 64 per cent of them were willing to pay more taxes to prevent pollution. The Herald reported that ‘rarely has the Saulwick Herald Poll found such strong and widespread public opinion on any issue’ ( l 3/2/89).

The public were told by the Board that secondary treatment would cost $3 billion and that rates would have to be doubled to pay for it. Thomas argued that this was ‘absurd, scare-mongering’ and that estimates prepared for him less than two years before had been less than half this amount. Moreover, even $3 billion capital expenditure and operating costs were not consistent with the threatened $400 annual rate increase (which would have raised more than $2.5 billion in just five years). Thomas pointed out that estimates for recycling options had also been grossly inflated.

The Herald had begun labelling its articles on the issue ‘Sydney’s Watergate’ and Tim Moore tried to reassure a press conference that there would be no more cover-ups or lies. He said: ‘We are determined the Water Board will tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and if that requires, as Richard Nixon once described it, minor correctional statements as we go along, then they will be taken’ (Herald, 8/3/89).

The Board tried a number of ways to stem the bad publicity. Apart from direct threats of legal action it was rumoured that at first Water Board executives lobbied senior executives of Fairfax to get the series of damaging articles stopped. However, the Board did not accuse the Herald of printing anything that was untrue and other media soon took up the story. Some, like the Telegraph and 2DAY FM, campaigned hard for a resolution to the issue. The Board placed full-page advertisements and their managing director, Bob Wilson, was worked of his feet with radio and television interviews. Senior Board executives were forced to work late hours and weekends to cope with the crisis.

Individual journalists were subjected to various forms of manipulation by Water Board public relations staff. Alan Tate received an angry phone call during which his professional ethics were questioned and he was told that it was unlikely that any Water Board employees would want to talk to him in future. Ten minutes later the same person rang him back and in quieter tones asked him to excuse the first call but to understand that everyone in the Board was under extreme pressure. He was told that at least one Board employee was under doctor’s orders to remain at home because of stress-related illness. Not surprisingly Tate was very upset by this call and he considered very carefully what he was doing. But his colleagues rallied round him and encouraged him to disregard what they saw as an effort to intimidate him.

Pressure was also put on me by members of the engineering profession. I had a phone call from a senior member of the Institution of Engineers who wanted to know whether I was competent to make statements to the media about the outfalls. He questioned my ethics and loyalty to the engineering profession, since I was criticising an engineering project. He even questioned my claim to be a lecturer at UNSW because he could not find me in their phone directory. He threatened to take me before a tribunal of the Institution for breaking the code of ethics.

The President of the Institution of Engineers, Alex McLachlan, also entered the debate. He accused the press of uninformed comment. His press release read, in part:

I deplore the denigration of Australian engineering endeavours which seems to occur too frequently these days. Innovative projects of this type should be recognised and supported by the community.
Australian engineering ability and performance is recognised throughout the world as being of the very highest calibre, with the Water Board in Sydney having its share of distinguished engineers. It Is important to Australia’s competitive performance that, where deserved, Australian engineering excellence is supported by our mass media. I believe the Ocean Outfalls project deserves this support.

It was revealed later in the Herald that McLachlan’s company had been retained by the Water Board as management consultants on the extended outfalls project (Herald  27/2/89).

The Board also tried to spread the blame. It had always pointed to other sources of beach pollution such as beach litter, marine pollution, ship spills, algae that looks like a sewage field, and pumice from volcanic eruptions in the Pacific Ocean, which was ‘frequently mistaken for grease from sewage discharges’. Furthermore, a Board fact sheet claimed, ‘. . . it has been estimated that anchovies of the coast of southern California produce as much faecal matter each year as 90 million people – and anchovies are only one of hundreds of species of marine life in this part of the ocean’ (Clear Water, Clean Sand,’ Background Briefing 3, 1987).

During the attacks of 1989 the Board and the SPCC tried to divert attention to the problem of stormwater drains. The public were told about how these drains contained high levels of faecal coliforms and would remain a problem even after the beaches were rid of sewage pollution from the outfalls. Stormwater drains are generally the responsibility of councils and it was hoped that urban run-off would be blamed for pollution problems with responsibility being shared by the councils and citizens who littered the streets. However the stormwater drains are often used as overflows for a sewage system that can no longer cope with even mildly rainy days because it has become so decrepit and cracked. High levels of faecal coliforms usually indicate sewage.

For example, when Waverley Council was considering putting up its warning signs the Environment Minister, Tim Moore, was concerned that the council might take the ‘political’ action of suggesting that waste pollution was caused solely by the sewage outfalls and not partly by council stormwater drains. If this were to be the case, he threatened, he might have to take them to court. Moreover, the Council has been accused of pouring raw sewage into the sea because two toilets at the swimming pool on Bondi Beach discharged directly into the sea. The significance of two toilets compared with the hundreds of thousands of toilets and industries which discharge into the ocean from other nearby headlands with little more than 11 per cent of solids removed is difficult to fathom.

Map – North Head sewage treatment plant

The land required at North Head for secondary treatment facilities was grossly exaggerated in Water Board propaganda. This figure shows the original land estimate made by the Board’s consultants in the 1979 Environmental Impact Statement for North Head. The larger area which later appeared in Water Board ‘fact’ sheets was enlarged to include the hospital and the seminary.