Money and Water – a volatile mix

I have been watching the recent SA Water billing issues and political response with great amusement – it’s all so very predictable.

Basically, the SA Parliament legislated last year to increase water charges – some by 13% from 1st July this year. But because the SA Water billing system is such a fossil, they couldn’t do it effectively on the day and so SA Water have been adding extra charges to bills generated from meter readings as they happen – some as early as last December.

All this means that the voters who have received those inflated bills are unhappy.

The state government has finally realised they will cop the blame and so they are proposing to refund *some* of the windfall. Or that is what Murdoch’s “daily shopper” reports – my guess is that it is a bit more complex.

The reason this has happened is that like so much of South Australia’s ageing infrastructure, no real investment in SA Water systems have been made for many decades and so the basic tools that we expect a water utility to have just don’t exist here. If they can’t get billing right then what about their people, assets, customer and demand management tools? My guess is that they are equally defective.

Actually, I know they are. It all reminds me of a time back in the “previous century” when I had responsibility for the billing systems of another state water authority – when the then leadership recognised the need to upgrade and move toward a more flexible system.

This was planned to be a system that could accommodate fast and unusual change and which was responsive to government, customer and business needs. It has been in place elsewhere since the mid 1990’s.

One of my early tasks was to travel the country, meeting with leaders from other water authorities – with the objective being to see if we couldn’t all get together and contribute to a system that would deal with uniquely Australian issues and more importantly be one that would satisfy the needs of our owners (the state governments), the various state water businesses and our customers.

Now I could write a book about the various responses to that. But the response of the then E&WS Department was - why?

Basically, the locals didn’t *get* the need for change – they were happy with what they had and couldn’t ever see a need for “flexible” billing – because well “we don’t do that sort of thing here”.

I am sure they don’t.