Sydney water contamination crisis: Manufacturing dissent

The widely publicised contamination of Sydney's water supply in July 1998 felt like a crisis to affected Sydney residents but the rhetoric did not match the reality. We are interested in the way our reality is constructed, the way we manufacture consent or dissent, the way in which some knowledge is privileged and the way that power is attached to this knowledge. The Sydney Water Contamination Crisis sparked our interest because it proved to be an excellent event to watch: we could daily track the construction of ‘truth’, the attempts to unravel or deconstruct this ‘truth’. It was also a fascinating study in paternalism and an example of public exclusion from the decision-making process. We speculate on some alternative decision-making approaches which might help us avoid a recurrence of the Sydney case study. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.