A $Million  is not enough to get it right

On  2 Feb 2005 the Rockingham district local paper the "Sound Telegraph" (owned by The West Australian) carried a full  back page advertisement for three local Labor MP's (Mark McGowan for Rockingham, Francis Logan for Cockburn, Norm Marlborough for Peel) and "Proudly Authorised by Kim Beazley MHR", member for Brand (Leader of the Opposition in the Fed. Australian Parliament), including the following two glaring mistakes, "Western Australia is the driest State in the driest country on earth".
The same page made up one side of a two sided A3 colour letterbox flyer, relevant part pictured. (click for full size pic.
In view of the situation that water resources and supply are controversial issues in Australia and particularly in Perth / SW WA, any misinformation is undesirable.
The text reads in part;
Secure our water supply (Western Australia is the driest State in the driest country on earth).

Both claims are dead wrong. South Australia is by far the driest State. Many countries are dryer than Australia.


First, on the Bureau of Meteorology web site (ref below)  readers can make graphs of various rainfall parameters for Australia, the various States and regional areas for the 1900 to 2004 period.
Clearly South Australia gets the nod as the driest State.
BoM ref http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/reg/cli_chg/timeseries.cgi

It may be fashionable to say we are the driest country but that too is wrong by a long shot.
If you average the Australian rainfall data 1950-2004 from the above web site you get 479mm per year.
Now 15 mins spent using the Google and Yahoo search engines turned up the results below showing many countries are much dryer than Australia.  The figures (except Australia) are just given as average annual rainfall, the period of the averaging is not given.

Australia 1950-2004: 479mm, Afghanistan:330mm, Chile:381mm, Greece:371mm, Iran:240mm, Iraq:154mm, Libya:271mm, Mauritania;152mm, Mongolia:203mm, Namibia365mm,  Saudi Arabia;112mm, South Africa:464mm, Sudan:155mm,  Syria:187mm, UAE:61mm.

My point about the $Million is that it is less than the sum taxpayers are footing each year for these MP's and their researchers, office staff etc.

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