Hunter residents could be forgiven for asking why work has not started on a proposed water desalination plant at Belmont.
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The plant came on the radar in 2017 when Hunter Water applied to the Department of Planning for approval to build an "off-the-shelf" facility capable of supplying up to 15 million litres of water per day.
The then Coalition government announced the $87 million plant in 2019 as an emergency measure to be switched on if dam levels dropped below 35 per cent. The state was in severe drought at the time. That summer's bushfires were horrific.
The drought-response desal plant was approved in 2021.
Fast forward more than two years and the region and state are again facing a drought.
Farmers have started selling livestock as rainfall fades and the temperature rises. Some of them told the Herald last week that they were astonished at how quickly the drought was taking hold.
Last month was the driest September in Australia since records began in 1900 and the second-driest September in NSW.
The Department of Primary Industries has declared Newcastle, Lake Macquarie, the Central Coast, Dungog, Port Stephens and Maitland in drought.
The Bureau of Meteorology warns the emerging El Nino pattern will drive the nation's south-east towards a scorching summer. Water restrictions are on the horizon in the Hunter as soon as March.
If the Hunter suffers severe drought before the desal plant is completed some time after 2027, 10 years after it was first proposed, the community will rightly question whether the government got the timing right.
The Newcastle Herald reports that the Belmont desal plant will take four years to build once Hunter Water finishes the detailed design and gains fresh planning approval for a permanent facility capable of producing 30 million litres a day, or 15 per cent of the region's water needs.
Jim Bentley, a former Hunter Water managing director and the state's top water bureaucrat before he took up a job in England this year, said in 2019 that deciding when to build a desal plant was complicated.
"We need to bear in mind [water] resilience isn't created just by building a piece of kit," he said at the time.
"What the right level is to build a piece of infrastructure that you are only going to need if you are in a drought is complex. If you invest in it and the drought ends, you have it sitting there having spent all that money and energy to build the plant."
Hunter Water has returned $316 million in dividends to the state government, plus a forecast $31 million for 2022-23, since it proposed the desal plant in 2017.
The Herald accepts that decisions around spending taxpayers' money on emergency infrastructure are not easy, but if the Hunter suffers severe drought before the desal plant is completed some time after 2027, 10 years after it was first proposed, the community will rightly question whether the government got the timing right.
