HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK

Innovative technical solutions for water management in Australia

University of Adelaide, 30 October 2006

Group C – Social sciences
Rapporteur: Dr June Marks

We first of all tried to define what the subject was that was under discussion. Energy tradeoffs for us meant energy used to treat and deliver water: conventional energy versus 'green' energy. So community values should be sought on whether there is a willingness to pay for green energy, which is usually a lot costlier than energy from conventional sources. And there was a recognition that all of these deliberations are context specific. We looked at a few case studies, like Roxby Downs, which ended up with a solution of desalination and wind energy rather than pumping water from the Murray River. Over on Eyre Peninsula they pay the same price for water as we do in Adelaide, and yet it has to be piped all the way to the peninsula from Adelaide and the Murray River.

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Then there is the urban and rural nexus and where the tradeoffs should occur there, as far as energy goes, in treating the water and getting it to these different areas.

There are assumptions about community perceptions and values by policy makers and the industry, and there is a need to allow communities to consider tradeoffs, because they may be willing to pay more. So it is the energy used for treatment, and the different sources. There could be a greater willingness to take a lower-quality source and use it for irrigation than to use energy to treat water up to the quality of drinking water for every use.

Energy is used for transportation, so supplies might be made available centrally, instead of locally. And perhaps there would a willingness to accept a lower pressure through pipes, because this helps with averting leakage in pipes, which is a huge waste of water; we need to know whether this is acceptable to communities. It requires less energy to put less pressure through pipes. So there is an issue of preparing communities for that change in water use.

Looking at water transport, we thought it was more an urban issue rather than agricultural, although we did talk about agriculture a little. There is a need to unpack the 'black box' of urban water supply so that people do understand that it is not falling out of the sky from nature, that it is actually a technological service, because all water has to be treated to a drinking water standard. And then users would need to be allowed to accept the responsibility of using that water and accepting that water quality.

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To consider central versus decentralised systems, and again we are looking at recycling water: there are cases where this is actually happening and it is very successful. Rouse Hill and Newington are two cases in Sydney. Mawson Lakes isn't as decentralised as it was originally planned to be, but again it is a place where people are using a different source of water, and that is going along quite well and it is a different way of doing things.

Also, the smaller water companies are working well with communities. There are a lot of agencies in Melbourne and also over here in the regions.

The ownership of water: people are keen on rainwater, and so we think they should be encouraged to collect rainwater where possible. On-site treatment may be not as acceptable if it requires maintenance, but at least the community should be given the opportunity to consider that for themselves.

A case was discussed about metering bores, and how people were opposed to the metering of their bores where they were extracting water for free. It was wondered why they would oppose this; it was mainly because this was imposed and not negotiated with them. And there are many cases of that. Werribee agricultural reuse is another case in point, where the whole idea of using recycled water was imposed on that community.

With agriculture, there is a problem with open channels and there are efficiencies obviously that could be captured in the agricultural sector, but there are already a lot of efficiencies in agriculture that are taking place in South Australia.

Transporting: there has been a lot of talk about pumping water from north to south, taking Ord River water and bringing it down to Perth. Do we laugh about that, or do we let the community imagine innovative solutions? It may be dreaming but at least it starts a discussion in the community of looking at different ways of using water and understanding that water isn't a taken-for-granted service.

Then, is the Mallee–Wimmera pipeline a good investment? Apparently that is going to cost about a billion dollars per 100 gigalitres of water. I guess that depends on the federal government, the state government and the local people involved in that decision, but that is a classical case where people are prepared to allow the cost of water to be high in order to have that resource.

Consultation in all these instances should have a holistic view, beyond lobbyists. (That was just a passing point.)

As far as standards go, on the question of water restrictions: are people aware of water shortages? Are there water shortages? Are they real water shortages? It was reported that in Sydney a few years ago people thought that water was a right, that there shouldn't be water restrictions. Now they're all on board and they're looking over their fence at their neighbour and what their neighbour is doing. They have become very supportive of the idea of water restrictions, because it is seen that there are water shortages across Australia and the national survey that we have done from Flinders certainly confirms that there is a high acceptance that there is a water shortage.

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Policy makers seem to determine discretionary and non-discretionary uses of water. So they are excluding plants from water in Sydney, for instance, where they have level 5 restrictions. Gardens are dying. But it was thought that maybe they should have negotiated that too, to see whether people would cut down on their showers rather than allow their garden to die; it has an environmental value for them.

Urban catchments have limited resources available, due to the cost of building more infrastructure to increase that supply. So that is a technological infrastructure sort of shortage.

Is it a question of no water, or is the water allocated to other sectors? This still requires discussion in the community, for them to take extra measures. But we all agreed that the stats are out: domestic usage per capita in Australia is very high.

So we thought the research required in this area concerns the willingness to pay; not to have water restrictions or to have a lower-grade water or all the other options; and different standards of water quality for different end uses.

Looking finally at risk management, we thought that includes absolutely everything. It includes the risk of trying to implement a project, as was the case in Toowoomba: it might not go ahead. It includes quality. But it was thought that there was excessive regulation of on-site water use – for instance, not allowing grey water systems to go ahead and being worried about people using rainwater for drinking, when there seems to be no problem about allowing people to manage their own swimming pools. There is seen to be, through that regulatory process, a quest for zero risk, but I think the community needs to recognise that you can't have zero risk. It doesn't exist. There have got to be some probabilistic measures of risk taken into account.

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There has to be thought given to the irrigation dependent communities. We talk a lot about excluding cotton and rice from Australia's landscape – then we would all have more water to use on our gardens and to have two showers a day instead of one as now – but we have got to look at the holistic view again. There is the risk for those people on the land that if allocations to them are cut, it will completely change their way of life and standard of living and community. There is a trade between the urban and rural already. There was an example given that SA Water perhaps claims – and maybe this is just hearsay – that if they bought out ten irrigators there would be enough water for Adelaide. That would solve all their problems.

Are we happy about markets? Blair Nancarrow pointed out in her paper that the social science research shows that people are not happy about markets governing allocation. Are we happy about markets governing trade – the trade of water from one point in the Murray River to another?

And there are different ways of thinking about risk. There is a big divide between the way experts think about risk and the way the community thinks about it, so we need to talk to one another to work out what those ways of thinking are.

Two recommendations come out of this: that the current institutions are actually an impediment to creative solutions and I think everyone knows that there has got to be institutional reform in order to tackle the problems that we are facing at the moment; and that the approaches to the community are lacking. There are too many decisions imposed on communities, and we need to bring them on board at the problem identification stage so they can have ownership of the solutions that are available to them.

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Discussion

Question – I have a question related to the amount of water that is used in garden watering, and whether or not people had thought about the planning constraints as part of the social thing. People might actually be involved in the planning side. I know a lot of the building codes now are not necessarily taking it into account that, say, people in high rise apartments are using as much as a family home, when you have just got a couple of people, and whether or not that is something that, as we are moving into increased urbanisation and more compact city planning, we should be looking at as part of that social fabric: whether or not people are willing to look at those kinds of tradeoffs. It's just something that had been mentioned.

June Marks – That sort of discussion is helpful, yes. We will include that point in our summary.