It rained last Friday, for the first time since we arrived in Adelaide just before the new year – an hour of steady, garden refreshing water falling from the sky. Down at the Kent Town station, it was recorded as 0.2mm, but up here where we are, 5km away and closer to the ranges that run down the south east side of Adelaide, we got much more than that.
By coincidence, our first water bill arrived on Friday.
It’s broken into four separate charges – a supply charge, covering infrastructure supply, a usage charge for the water we actually used, a wastewater charge, for well, wastewater including sewerage, and a levy to Save the River Murray. The money raised by the levy is used by the state government to, amongst other things, buy water allocations from upstream irrigators, so that more water is left in the dying river.
What I found curious was that our fixed supply charges, over which we have no control, far outweighed our usage charge (not withstanding that the previous owner of the house will be paying most of the supply charge this time around anyway). So I went digging around the SA Water site to find out what I could about the pricing structure.
The wastewater charge is based on property value – $1.424 per $1,000 of value p.a, with a minimum charge of $284 p.a. I found it hard to track down a figure for the average official house value in Adelaide, but according to SA Water, the average property value in the state is somewhere between $401,000 and $450,000. So being conservative, an average wastewater charge per year might be between $570 and $640.
SA Water was much more informative when it came to how much water residential customers use. It turns out that the average household in Adelaide uses about 241 kilo litres, or 241,000 litres of water per year. That’s priced at 50c per kilo litre for the first 125,000 litres, and $1.16 / kilo litre thereafter. So an average household can expect to pay water usage charges of about $200 per year.
Water usage is just not that expensive, in comparison to the wastewater charges over which customers have no control, other than by shifting to a cheaper house.
Having been a policy wonkette in my previous life in New Zealand, I contacted SA Water, and asked to talk to the policy people there. I spoke to a lovely chap, who was very helpful in explaining the reasoning behind the wastewater charge, most of which I had worked out for myself, but I wanted to confirm my thinking (water policy is a very new area to me). The big costs with wastewater are associated with infrastructure, which has a fixed cost. The wastewater infrastructure has to be configured to cope with storm events, not just average daily usage. Hence the high cost. Starting from a greenfields state, it might be sensible to have a fixed charge per property, but there are social equity issues involved, and for whatever reasons, over the years state governments from both sides of the political divide have elected to engage in some redistribution of cost by requiring wealthier people, with estimates of wealth based on property values, to pay more than people who are less well off.
The water use charges are genuinely based on what it costs to supply water. Alas, they will be getting more expensive in future, given the state government’s decision to build an energy hungry desalination plant. Because it is at the bottom of the Murray, South Australia has always been an efficient water user, but in the recent drought, and given the greed (my word, not the SA Water chap’s word) of irrigators upstream, the SA government now needs to find alternative sources of water.
But for the time being, water usage just doesn’t make up all that much of the average water bill.
What I find curious about all this is that the economic incentives associated with water use don’t match the rhetoric surrounding it. We are constantly urged to save water, to use water friendly appliances (for example, front loading washing machines instead of top loaders), to save water from say, showers and other comparatively clean uses within the house to use on the garden. Using water on gardens is strictly controlled – we are only allowed to water for three hours a week, and even then, we can’t use sprinklers – and people are encouraged to put in rainwater tanks. And it seems that people “supervise” their neighbours’ water use. There’s a lovely green garden a few blocks away from us, indicating substantial water use. The residents have defensive signs on the fences – “This property uses bore water.” There’s no need for signs like that unless people don’t trust each other.
So it seems that instead of using economic incentives to encourage people to minimise water use, the state government is using social control instead. People look over each others’ shoulders, comment on what they are doing, make judgements based on superficial assessments of what they can see, report perceived misdeeds to the authorities. Even worse, we have bought into the dominant meme, constantly assessing our own water use, and regulating our own behaviour, based not on what it actually costs us, but on what we think we are required to do. It seems that we have come to live in a water police state.
god… i so, so disagree.
what you’re living in is a society under transition.
once upon a time australians busily convinced themselves that they were in an antipodean england, one where water was abundant and water-hungry agri/horticulture was sustainable.
drought and the constantly documented decline of water systems like the murray-darling are making the nation wake up to itself. what you’re seeing as “social control” is imho a form of social preservation and strong social responsibility. that *drinking* water people put all over their gardens is drawn from the communal pool, if they’re squandering it on cucumbers then they’re endangering everyone.
and personally, i think it’s a good thing that it is strictly left to disincentives like pricing, otherwise the well-off would continue to squander what is a limited resource… believe me, i’ve seen people washing their 4x4s with drinking water.
like i mentioned on another of your posts, think seriously about a grey-water tank. it’ll take all the shower/laundry water and make it available for your garden, and your toilet. it won’t cut down waste water, but it will let you use the pure drinking water for better purposes.
Interestingly enough in NZ where water is metered (e.g. Tauranga), waste water treatment is included as part of the council rates (and therefore linked to property value). In one way does follow logically if you have a larger house (and therefore high property value), you would have more people living in it and therefore producing more waste water. What you are experiencing is the same as in NZ except that an amount is being expressly stated on a monthly bill.
I would expect that large percentage of household water is ‘wasteful’ (i.e. goes down the drain and ends up in a treatment plan). The amount of water used for a household for drinking and cooking is small compared with that used for cleaning, washing clothes, toilets, showering/bathing etc.
If they wanted a seperate charge for waste water then a simpler method would be to charge a different base on total (or a proportion) of total water used. Or even better just charge a higher rate on total water used.
I suppose it is a different kettle of fish, when you can draw water from different supplies.
I remember in one of my politics lectures back in the day that one of the reasons Italy had such a high voter turnout was because it was recorded on your national ID card whether you voted or not!
“wasting” water on a vege garden is arguable IMO. It’s the people who (still!) water their concrete and so on that really need to be pressured, and social pressure is a great leveller. I’ve met too many people who just go “I can afford it”, or worse “I pay for it so I have the right to use as much as I want”. Those people are responsible for the high-cost margin demand satisfaction problem we have, as well as being immune to any realistic or reasonable monetary pricing scheme. But often they’re more influenced by peer/neighbour pressure than poorer people. So yeah, put the pressure on.
Sydney is much, much worse for water wastage than Adelaide but I was still surprised at waste there. I was staying in a greenie house and their neighbourhood had quite a few “we’re wasting your groundwater” signs too, as well as people wasting drinking water. There was a slow campaign running in the area to reduce that waste, but it was meeting a lot of resistance. Mostly from the trasher generations, but even from some younger people.
Having drunk Adelaide water I can’t understand anyone there *not* wanting a rainwater tank.
I really, really, really dislike the idea of social control. I just don’t want my neighbours inspecting my daily doings, for fear that I would be doing something wrong. Can’t they trust me to be a decent person? The thing is, police states don’t just come from police overseeing the activities of citizens; they also derive their strength from citizens inspecting each other. It leads to a surveillance society.
If some obnoxious, anti-social f*^%wits think that if they pay for water, then any use of it is justified, that suggests to me that the pricing model is wrong. I would go for even great price differentials than the South Australian model – $0.5 for the first 125 kilo litres, $1.16 for the next 150 or so, up to about average usage, then much more punitive rates after that. The ‘excess’ earned could be used to buy back more water for the Murray.
The upside of a good pricing model is that it is impersonal. There’s no sense of a particular individual supervising your behaviour, making sure that you stay within regulated bounds.
Grey water…. I’m not so keen. There’s some health issues, and sooner or later, the residue plonked on your garden builds up. We already have primitive jugs on benches ready to save clean “grey” water, which later gets thrown onto the grape vines, but I’m just no so keen on anything more intensive. I’m more interested in rain water tanks. We have some already; when finances permit, I want to get some more, to get the water from the other side of the house.
As for drinking the Murray water – if you grit your teeth, you get a fine residue….
Actually, it’s not as bad as I recalled from last time we were in Adelaide. I don’t know if that’s because we are in a different council area, or simply because we have a filter system. Or maybe it’s because we keep a jug of water in the fridge, so it’s nicely chilled before we drink it.
still not sure why you’re seeing it as social “control”. it’s social-responsibility without state intervention. the idea of punitive tariffs is a state-centric idea though…
perhaps there’s another way to look at it. a beautiful green garden is an exception in a semi-arid landscape. if you want to own that exception, you need to be able to justify it to your peers, or provide means that don’t have negative externalities (such as running down the communal pool).
i also agree with moz. the bore water is just lowering everyone’s water table. damn selfish idea.
and think about grey water as well (i know i’m harping on). the residue you’re referring to is a product of using unsafe domestic cleaning consumables. normally you pay someone else to remove them from your water before it’s recycled, but you can do it yourself by using low-chemical products at home.
Grey water residue has not been an issue for me, but then I’ve mostly used it in the sandy rubbish that passes for soil in much of Sydney. As Che Tibby says, using the proper cleaning products in the appropriate quantities helps a lot (most manufacturers suggest you vastly overuse their products). We’ve tested veges grown in semi-treated grey water (washing machine rinse water, shower pre-run etc put through a reed bed) and the path report was no worse than the control. The local cats are more of a problem than grey water in that respect.
One thing that also works if you’re lucky for location is getting rainwater from neighbours if they don’t have a tank. Or they’re not collecting all their rainwater for some reason (schools and businesses are useful in that respect).