Professor Tom Collins:

I would see this as being about civic responsibility and civic duty. The Public Water Forum believes that every citizen should have a free entitlement to a water allowance. That includes teenagers as well as younger children. We believe every citizen has that entitlement, but we also believe that comes with a civic responsibility, especially for a resource like water. As Mr. Wright has pointed out, we do not see the excessive use charge as a revenue-generating one. We see it as an incentive to conserve. We also see it as an incentive for the individual citizen to take responsibility for what happens between the water meter and their house. If there is not an incentive for the householder to walk their land and assess whether there is a leakage problem, the likelihood is that it will not happen.

The Public Water Forum considered this recommendation of the commission and found it was in support of it purely on the conservation argument. It was also based on building citizen responsibility, recognising that there are citizen rights, but with those rights go duties. Part of the duty is that this is a scarce and vulnerable resource and so there is a duty on the individual householder to protect it. If there was a run on a privately-owned resource in a house, which the householder was not supervising - such as their credit card, for example - we would expect them to supervise, measure and manage it, and act accordingly. The same expectation applies here. That is how the Public Water Forum has considered the issue and arrived at a view on it.

I recognise that there are big transactional charges and cost recovery charges in all of this. Ultimately, the revenue and conservation questions almost become two separate discussions. The decision on whether to finish the metering process strikes me as a big one. There is a big recommendation confronting this committee in that regard. If one had never started out on the metering project, one might say that the returns on this do not necessarily add up. Having started on it, however, there is another question, which is: "Do you render as void all of the investment we've made to date, if we don't complete it?" Those are the kinds of choices the committee is faced with, but they are not easy calls.