It tells us how precious water is, how water restrictions have conserved it, and gives us five rules to follow: use manual watering systems only between 8pm and 10am, automatic ones only between 10pm and 10am, fit your hose with a trigger nozzle, no hosing of paved areas and apply to fill a pool.
Water is apparently so precious we are going to be ideologically stupid and petty over it.
None of the above give any incentive to develop water-saving technology. None whatsoever. They give no incentive for builders to make water saving a feature of their constructions. They give no incentive for the development of clever water-saving gadgets or techniques. They are just a set of prying intrusions treating us like children.
If water is scarce raise the price. So people do have incentives to develop water-saving technology, make water-saving a feature of constructions, develop clever gadgets and techniques.
This is elementary. Unless you are ideologically fuckwitted and patronisingly arrogant about how people are to be treated. After all, raising the price says hey, we are going to give you automatic information which treats everyone the same and leave the response up to you.
Having a set of intrusive rules says you children need to be told what to do by your betters and we hope the naughty children don’t ignore the rules too much.
The contemporary ALP tends to be dominated by teachers. Sometimes it shows.
Worried about the cost for poor people? That’s what rebates (or rebate-paid discounts) are for, morons. But they are not stupid, just patronising true believers who are too arrogant to consider a different point of view and find telling other people what to do far too congenial.
I despise the social stupidity of it.
But I despise even more the nasty, arrogant, controlling, small-mindedness of it.
ADDENDA The
has directed my attention to various rebates for installing water saving devices. While I concede that they are less dumb than not doing them, they still have problems, see comments below.- Current Mood:contemptuous
- Current Music:street sounds
Comments
And petrol is so much more expensive! Consider the poor people ...
Mind you, so does petrol-sniffing. And car accidents.
Bureaucracies, eh? Each department has no clue, and different policies on what other departments handle.
Try houses. Or jobs.
Some departments aren't so bad. And a politician always ultimately signs off on it.
But luckily we're all as ethical as lawyers who also don't have to worry about their jobs or earning money.
:)
In the strictest scientific sense, this is true - that you can't live without water. But that has nothing to do with water rates and water restrictions.
The idea that some things are too important to be priced properly is not sensible.
The idea that a decent society ensures everyone has a reasonable go at the necessities is fair enough. That's what the tax-and-welfare system is for.
A 'solution' which ameliorates but does not solve a problem provides bureaucratic careers forever.
A 'solution' which really is, doesn't. What do you think governments will generally end up doing?
not everyone can afford to buy newer washing machines/house hold appliances over to water saving versions, even with the rebates.
houses should start recycling thier household waste for use, but until that becomes a viable cost effective option for the average house owner/builder, it wont happen, and they dont really care.
city dwellers have always has an infinite supply of water without ever considering it. And it seems as a commodity it is getting scarce, yes they need to find more damn/supplys for the growing citys but until that addressed you need to mind it.
and people are stupid and need to be told these things. just walk around your neighbourhood, it drives me crazy when i see people wasting it, leaving hoses running and water running off into the street in the middle of a hot day, poor management and not to mention bad for the garden anyway.
I was brought up in the country, you had water if it rained, no pipes lines from the mystical water fountain that never dried up..
if you ran out that was it, well, you had to buy a truck load to come fill the tanks up for you, and when your poor its an expense you can't afford, we had no rebate for having to buy water.
so water conservation has always been an issue for me, and to see people complaining that they cant have a green lawn it rediculous.
Water should absolutely not be free, because it is not infinite and how much we use matters.
Corporations supply food, drink, housing, clothing. That seems to work quite well (indeed, a great deal better than getting govt to do the same). And I actually want corporations, like everyone else, to pay the real scarcity value of water.
living in a flat I conceed that dont know how excess water bills are charged here in vic, as that handled by the body corporate/home owner, and not the renter directly, but I will assume it's basically the same as tassie, that once you use your allocated X amount of litres per house hold, your are charged considerably per litre, and so on top of your household rates you already have this excess water bill, which is hip pocket hitting. but that only educates those that are already financially hard off.
if you have lived on a low income you know that any extra bill is going to be a major disadvantage to your basic living conditions, and anyone whos ever had to go without decent food to pay the power bill or rent already knows this.
so I am definately against it being taxed or priced higher, for those reasons, and specially against it being owned/provided by private corporations, where it will become about profit turning, rather than the provision of a basic human necessity
I agree with catside below, that eduction on water consumption has been working for all.
And I have lived on a low income with little money, indeed, fairly recently. But the notion that prices only affect people on low income is demonstrably false. And, as I said, I am happy for rebates for low income people.
One of the (many) problem of water restrictions is that they are inherently unfair -- the diligent obey them and the feckless don't. Prices are inherently fairer.
Check out :http://www.savewater.com.au/default.as
I think there is quite good balance between regulation and encouragement - even for business.
"This thing is underpiced item, so we will make it even more underpriced if you install water saving devices".
Just more unnecessary complication which still underates water scarcity and provides an insufficient incentive structure. And the rebates are govt set prices for actions: I'm sorry, they have a really bad record for very good reasons.
Price water properly. Give rebates to low income households. Simple, effective: much more effective, indeed.
Only if given that water must be expensive. If access to water is a human right, then your argument becomes less tenable. Instead of everyone having access to water, your method would introduce more beaurocracy to keep track of who is elegible for rebates or not, and those who fall foul of that beaurocracy and don't have the resources to fight miss out. Don't even try to pretend it wouldn't happen. Privatising water would even more egregious, as people who cannot afford their inflated water bills would simply be cut off, and alternative supplies would be made illegal. This is not a hypothetical argument, it has happened, and is worse than I could have invented.
Education, instead, has inculcated a sense of the worth of water far deeper than mere money can do. Even wealthy people are loath to obviously waste water, where if the disincentive was purely economic, then large swimming pools and hosing down the driveway become status symbols of conspicuous consumption. You may not believe the strength of the social conditioning as to the worth of water in Australia until you go overseas. Phoenix has a much worse situation than we do, being in a landlocked state almost entirely composed of desert. Their water supply is piped from the Colorado river or from interstate (check on a map how far that is, it is equivalent to us getting our water from the Murray). Their population is Huge, and getting bigger. And everywhere you look there are green lawns, swimming pools, and the biggest Public Works project on the way when I was there was a huge system of decorative canals. The locals don't see that there is any problem, where any Australian you care to name would take one look and choke in disbelief.
Also, if costs are going to be commensurate, check out how much farmers pay per litre. They are heavily subsidised, use most of the water which is used in the state, and scream like stuck pigs when the suggestion is made that they might have to pay near to market rates. While you are on your high horse, go take a look at them, then come back to us about Market Rates and what is 'dumb'. A desert country really has no place trying to grow rice in a drought.
And of course farmers should pay proper prices. I do mean everyone.
Your point about cultural factors just means that Australians will respond more strongly at lower prices. Australia's drought history no doubt is a factor.
Water is no more a 'human right' than food, shelter etc are. Water is a resource, and should be priced accordingly.
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Maybe they should be ??
That one's been tried. Doesn't work.
Maybe it was just implemented wrong ;-)
Watching something operate, we can see its nature. Socialism has been tried a lot, in lots of different forms. The patterns of failure, particuarly in the longer term, are consistent.
2. There are ALREADY requirements for water saving in new constructions
3. Persuading clients to install water saving technology in their major buildings became SO much easier after water restrictions came in. Water restrictions are a constant reminder to save water, in a way that a quarterly bill can't.
4. Human behaviour is a funny thing. Did you know that people who install water saving shower heads don't necessarily save much water? They tend to use the installation to justify having longer showers. I suspect that increasing the price of water would just benefit the manufacturers of water saving gadgets, without saving very much water.
5. The measures required by the permanent water restrictions are just the sensible habits of a water saver - EVEN if they have the nifty water saving gadgets you're suggesting.
Having a set of intrusive rules says you children need to be told what to do by your betters and we hope the naughty children don’t ignore the rules too much
6. You could say similar things about littering laws, or speeding, what's the difference?
Sometimes rules are simply necessary. Not littering public space, having clear procedures on roads, that's fine. They are both common spaces where rules are needed to optimise interaction and use. You can price infringement (fines) and sometimes use (tolls) but prices are not going to get you all the way.
Such rules also take significant enforcement (but a lot less than they might because we are a fundamentally law-abiding culture and they have an obvious sensible purpose.)
All the things you describe are complicated mechanisms to do something which could be done much more simply and efficiently. Not only are they complicated -- so wasteful in social resources compared to the alternative -- there is an excellent chance that they are poorly calibrated (a propensity which tends to increase over time). Regulations tend to set absolute thresholds, when a more efficient (i.e. less wasteful) method would provide a gradient for action. Which is what prices do.
Rebates are not an answer to letting the poorer people afford the more expensive neccessities in life.
Why?
Well you still have to come up with the money to pay for these things in the first place. Sure you get that money back, eventually, but in the mean time it leaves you critically short for other things, like food and rent. By all means raise the price of water but have a mechanism where low income families can have reduced up front costs. A sliding scale would also work, use more water and pay a higher price per unit.
On the other topics you are however right. There needs to be incentives to improve and innovate with the water usage systems. We have had suitable technology at a consumer level to reduce our national water usage quite considerably for nearly an entire generation of australians.
Grey water recycling, washing machines that use less water (the amount of water a "family" machine uses could keep a typical lawn watered for nearly a week), low flush toilets (I will admit however that many of these don't deal with no 2's all that well). Problem with all this technology is that they are mostly out of the affordability range for the people who would benefit the most. If water prices rise, and I am in agreement that it should, then the extra money should go towards making these items more affordable.
Rebates could be done as discounts, with the State government paying the rebates to the water providers.
Also, if prices go up 10% and you cut your usage by 10%, then your bill hasn't actually changed.
Up until 1973, per capita GDP and per capita petrol consumption increased together. Since then, the latter has plateaued while the former continues to rise. Price effects are real.
Cigarettes are addictive, they are not a good example of price effects.
In the short term, it is possible water restrictions are more effective. In the longer term, I bet they are not.
And people paying the real price for a resource funds better management of that resource.
Actually, it goes down slightly.
Where price = p (in dollars/litre) and usage = u (in litres)
then the old bill = pu.
If the cost increases by 10%, and the usage decreases by 10%, then the equation becomes
newbill = 1.1p x 0.9u, or,
newbill = pu x (1.1 x 0.9) = old bill x 0.99
Thus the new bill will always be less, QED.
But that assumes that the increase in price can be soaked by those who can't afford the difference, and that it will be noticed by those who can, which is not a given. It also assumes that the usage can be reduced by 10%, which is more of a problem for the poor, who don't tend to have swimming pools and lawns to worry about, nor the resources to upgrade their water use infrastructure.
You are correct. Why restrict water usuage when it is available. Tommorrow may be a rainy day with abundant more water.
Have a good day.
http://www.carbonadvicegroup.com/uk/ind
The whole carbon tax/carbon trading notion rests on exactly the same point.