SA Water

The Hon. J.A. DARLEY (14:40): Supplementary: would the minister agree that this is nothing more than a tax, not just a supply charge?

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER (Minister for Sustainability, Environment and Conservation, Minister for Water and the River Murray, Minister for Climate Change) (14:40): I tried to explain to the honourable member that in fact SA Water needs to recover costs. We have $13 billion worth of assets. There are many different ways you can actually construct a charging system, and, in the many different ways that you would care to look at, someone is going to be worse off. If the Hon. Mr Darley is asking for this process to be changed, then it is also incumbent on him to do some work and realise who is going to be worse off by this and who will be impacted. This is the work government has to do when it considers changes to charging systems.

If you do move away from a supply charge, how then do you recover costs of a $13 billion asset base for your business? How do you do it? Do you increase prices for water? Is that what he is suggesting: that you increase the three-tier charge pricing for water? So, I have to say, whilst it is fairly reasonable to have a view about a different charging mechanism, you need to do the due diligence and work out who will be impacted, who will be worse off by these changes, and then do an analysis about whether that is really worth doing.

At the moment, we have a system where the Valuer-General proclaims certain titles and we strike a supply charge against those land charges, in effect trying to cover the costs of the assets that need replacing. As I say, you could put a proposition forward that we increase the cost of water and reduce the supply charges, or take them away for some households, but again, you need to do the flow-on impact of that: who will benefit, who will lose, and is that change actually going to make a significant difference to anybody?