To: The Advocate
Faxed on 11-5-1995
Subject: local tip

Tipping ‘a bucket’
It’s not rubbish, it’s PR, to paraphrase your frontpage headline (Advocate, May 3) - and it’s perfectly permissible of course to dwell on the artistic fallout of the Tuncurry tip rather than dredge up malodourous muck. For a bit of contrast, from a self-appointed “Devil’s Advocate” (now here’s a name for a column, complete with volunteer contributor!), permit me to (de)posit some alternative arguments.

Waste management in this council area is due for some cleaning up, as consultants Dames & Moore will no doubt discover in their $30,000 study, and, hopefully, the public health and safety aspects of such operations will be uppermost in their minds. Some of your readers will be aware from a recent SMH report that the new State government has seen fit to phase out a tip at Londonderry where a Health Department study found a disturbingly high incidence of various cancers among residents.
Not close enough for discomfort? Ok, consider this: a person knowledgeable in tip operations claims Tuncurry is being operated without any provision to seal the garbage cells in the ground against the escape of leachate - a potentially carcinogenic cocktail of dissolved chemicals. In the sandy soils of Tuncurry, this should percolate into the local watertable in no time... Considering the cavalier attitude to waste disposal in the Great Lakes area in the past it would not surprise me if our councillors have sanctioned such practice. (People who emember the reign of one Marcel Terry may recall that in those days, a tip was operated right on the southern shore of Wallis Lake - I wonder if oyster farmers have their current crops checked out for any possible contamination by leachates from that area!)
Worried by the revelation referred to earlier, I rang councillor Linda Gill to interest her in a bit of muck-raking regarding the Tuncurry operation. But I don’t know if it is that the environment is always greener on the other side of an election or if those who laboured so hard to get Carr’s mob across the line are now regarded as too tough to tackle, whatever the reason, I got the distinct impression that I’d come to the wrong door.
So let me repeat my questions in public, and perhaps others will chip in with pertinent comments.
Is it true that Tuncurry tip is operated without safeguards against leachate escape? If so, is Great Lakes Council aware of this? If it is, does council condone such practice? On what grounds? Is it advisable to have a waste facility operated by private enterprise or something very similar? If we have to pay for the contractor to do the job, and then hear complaints that the money we pay doesn’t cover the costs of the operation, why don’t we - through our appointed and paid management team - keep doing the job ourselves? Perhaps we can re-allocate funds from some other area (and I could think of a couple, not least the funds wasted on patching up internal power play a la ‘let’s get rid of Fitzgerald’)?
Meanwhile, I expect that Dames & Moore will dredge up some independent answers.