2025 Northcliffe (Western Australia)
WA’s wettest towns have had no local drinking water for 15 years
15/12/25: ABC News by Jon Daly
The state government has trucked water to two of Western Australia’s wettest towns day in, day out for the past 15 years at a cost of at least $4 million — so far.
Quinninup and Northcliffe, 350 kilometres south of Perth, receive an average of 1 metre of rain a year.
However, the towns’ water schemes are exclusively supplied by contractors trucking in potable water from neighbouring towns Pemberton or Manjimup, 50km away.
Mary Williams often counts the water trucks passing by her old mill cottage in the hamlet of Quinninup, where she has lived for 25 years.
“It must be costing them a fortune,”
Ms Williams said.
Her record was a dozen in a single summer’s day, but she wonders how many more will come.
“How many more trucks are they going to keep running?” she asked.
“Is it going to be eventually that we’re going to have trucks nose-to-tail just to keep water in the community?”
‘Cost-effective’ water solution
The Cook government insists it is the most practical solution for the small towns with a combined population of about 450 people.
“Current demand and population forecasts for these towns remain modest, and there has been no change that would warrant moving away from carting as the most efficient supply method,” a spokesperson said.
“Over the past decade, average annual carting costs have been approximately $200,000 per scheme, ensuring a cost-effective and dependable service.”
The trucks offer little comfort to residents during the summer, when visitor numbers swell and bushfire risk intensifies.
Ms Williams fears it was inevitable that a fire would sweep through Quinninup, with residents having few household means of defending their homes.
“There is no such thing as stay and defend. We get out,”
she said.
Not a drop to drink
Both towns once had their own local sources of drinking water, but these were defunct due to quality concerns.
Karri Lake is a 56-gigalitre dam in Quinninup, which also has a mothballed water treatment plant a few hundred metres from the town.
The lake was proclaimed a drinking water source in the early 2000s, but was reverted to a recreational dam in 2009 by the state-owned water agency, the Water Corporation.
It came to view the lake as a “risky” drinking water source due to nearby residential septic systems.
It is a familiar story at Northcliffe, where town water was once drawn from a spring-fed dam on Michael Armstrong’s family farm to the east of town.
“It was a gentleman’s agreement with my grandmother, my father and then me,” Mr Armstrong said.
Mr Armstrong said the deal ended in 2010 when the then-Department of Water decided the source needed to be better protected from contamination.
“They were talking about limiting my future growth and also planting trees on a considerable area of my land that ran into that source,”
he said.
Those decisions coincided with a shift in national drinking water quality guidelines, prioritising proactive protection of water sources.
In 2013, Water Corporation chief operating officer Peter Moore told a parliamentary standing committee that guidelines had shifted to more proactive measures to protect water sources.
He said that explained why Northcliffe’s water source was abandoned.
“They have gone to looking not so much on just testing and analysing but looking to numbers of barriers you have in place as protections,” Mr Moore said.
“So, you are restructuring your whole scheme based on barriers.
“Source protection was the first barrier, treatment is the second barrier and so on and so forth.”
Daily water carting has been viewed as the most economical option ever since.
“It’s stupidity,”
Mr Armstrong said.
“We’re the wettest town in the state, and we’re getting water carted in from out of town.”
Water trucks and a drying climate
Water Corporation’s 2015 Water Forever: South West report identified several alternatives, including water pipelines from Pemberton, a new surface water dam at Northcliffe and a micro-desalination plant at Windy Harbour.
A Water Corporation spokesperson said none of the alternatives were viable.
“Groundwater investigations identified low-yield aquifers and quality risks. A new dam is not feasible due to constrained land availability and environmental constraints,” the spokesperson said.
Those options were also considered too costly, given the modest water needs of Quinninup and Northcliffe, which have the lowest scheme water demand in the South West region.
The pipeline, for instance, was estimated to cost a combined $61 million.
Last month, WA Water Minister Don Punch told the ABC the cost of building infrastructure for towns like Northcliffe was huge, making water carting a “viable option”.
“That’s not ideal but it’s a solution that applies to that community at this point in time,”
Mr Punch said.
Many residents question whether millions of taxpayer dollars spent on carting water would have been better invested in a permanent fix long ago.
“It doesn’t take long for that four million or five million or 10 million [dollars] to be sucked up and spat out the other end,”
Mr Armstrong said.
Both towns are forecast to double water usage from 28 megalitres of water a year to 60 megalitres by 2060.
Previous state government modelling predicts rainfall could decline by up to 25 per cent by then under a worst-case scenario.
Manjimup Shire President Donelle Buegge said these communities needed a long-term solution sooner rather than later.
“We are going to be one of the hardest hit in a drying climate,”
she said.
Ms Williams said the year-round movement of water trucks through the southern karri forests was easy to ignore when so few people could hear them.
“I think [the government] think it’s a problem they’d hope would go away. If they ignore it enough, it doesn’t exist,” she said.