Following the raging white elephant that was the FINA World Swimming Championship, the Government is trying to justify the expense of building and filling a temporary swimming pool (in the midst of a drought) at the Melbourne Tennis Centre—by draining the water into a pond in the Botanic Gardens and watering a few trees.
Over the next two days, 6.8 million litres of water from the two temporary swimming pools at Rod Laver Arena will be used to fill a lake in the Royal Botanic Gardens and irrigate drought-affected historic elms across the city.
At a cost of around $100,000 to do the process of treating the water and moving the water
plus the cost of building and filling two temporary pools in the first place it strikes me as money very badly spent. I'm probably terribly ignorant but the Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre was perfectly suitable for the Commonwealth Games circus, so I really can't understand why it wasn't suitable for the FINA circus.
All of this makes me pretty grumpy, but what really annoys me? They just dumped the drainage pipe right over the bike path!
For the $100k, you'd reckon they could have hired a little bit of scaffolding to make it go overhead—or even run it over the Swan St bridge for free…