John Argue Officer of the Order of Australia (AO)

John Argue has been honoured in the Australia Day list. The citation for John’s Officer of the Order of Australia recognised his:

‘Distinguished service to engineering through contributions to the development of stormwater management and technology as a researcher and academic.’

This is wonderful recognition for John Argue who has made a lifetime contribution to quantity management in stormwater. It is also more than that; it is also recognition of an industry which continues to go from strength to strength.

In 2010 the SIA embarked on an ambitious leadership project to develop a process to allow the assessment of the performance of water quality treatment devices. Perhaps naively we settled on a segment of the industry as a ‘first cab off the rank’ to explore the development of a testing protocol.

At the time there were discussions within the National committee about how such an initiative may be accepted by the industry and we established a working group (comprised of a range of reps from all States to work with CSIRO to complete a literature review of the verification techniques and approaches that had been tried before both locally and internationally. We sought (and got) co-operation from many industry players and also sought to get feedback from asset managers to understand how performance met with expectations.

Half way through its first term the Ballieu government is beginning to implement its reform agenda for water management in Victoria. The program is ambitious and covers many of the areas that the Stormwater industry has long recognised as being vital if truly integrated water reform is to be achieved.

When coming to Office water minister Peter Walsh established a The Living Victoria, Living Melbourne Ministerial Advisory Council (MAC) with the task of taking a ‘clean sheet’ examination of the water industry and to make recommendations on directions forward.   An interim report in the form of a Roadmap was released in mid 2011. The Roadmap recognised that a ‘prize’ was on offer and the Government set about undertaking a systematic review of the entire system to understand where, how and what improvements were possible.  

In late April the MAC released its implementation plan and was adopted in full by the Government in its response in time for the State budget in early May.

A re-elected Gillard Labor Government will help more communities across Australia roll out stormwater projects that assist in securing their future water supplies.

We simply cannot afford to let precious water go to waste.

Based on the strong community interest to date, Prime Minister Julia Gillard today announced the Stormwater Harvesting and Reuse program would receive a significant boost.

The Prime Minister also announced that Waterproofing Eastern Adelaide will be the first project to be funded from the expanded program.

This project brings together the Burnside, Norwood, Payneham, St Peters, Campbelltown, Tea Tree Gully and Town of Walkerville councils to create a network of stormwater capture, storage and distribution sites across eastern Adelaide.