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Legislative Council - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2015-10-13 Daily Xml
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Water Meters

The Hon. J.A. DARLEY (15:16): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Water questions with regard to meter readings.

Leave granted.

The Hon. J.A. DARLEY: I understand that meter readings, or estimated meter readings, are printed on SA Water accounts. This enables owners and tenants to check the reading on the meter against the amount they have been charged for. However, I recently noticed that units which have a shared meter, but individual accounts for each unit, do not have meter readings on the account.

My office has been contacted by several constituents in the past who have discovered that there was an error in reading their meter, and was able to contact SA Water to have the mistake rectified. However, those without a meter reading on their account are unable to do so. My questions are:

1. Can the minister advise why meter readings are not provided in such circumstances?

2. Will the minister ask SA Water to include meter readings on the accounts for these properties?

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER (Minister for Sustainability, Environment and Conservation, Minister for Water and the River Murray, Minister for Climate Change) (15:17): The honourable member brings up a couple of points. Estimated meter readings, of course, are usually made, as far as I know, when the meter readers can't actually access the meter on a property for whatever reason; it may well be that the gate is locked, or there might be a dog present on the property, for example, or there hasn't been some sort of alternative arrangement entered into with SA Water or its meter readers, so estimated meter readings are made.

Cards are normally left for the customer and, has I have done in the past, then it is the customer's job, if they wish, to go and check the meter themselves, fill in the little card with the meter reading they have taken, and submit that to SA Water to have an account sent out that has been corrected. Alternatively, of course, you can accept the estimate and the cost, pay the bill, and have it corrected at the next or subsequent meter reading. These are usually easy to arrange by ringing the SA Water customer service line. In terms of shared meters, of course—

The Hon. J.S.L. Dawkins: In comes the text message.

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER: Yes, it is, from the lower house for some reason—we've had success. There is a difficulty when it comes to shared meters, and normally what happens in that situation is there is some sort of ability to share the cost across the meter. It may be, as I have also experienced when I used to reside in a flat in a strata group, a proportion of the water cost would be apportioned across the different flats in the group. Upstairs flats, typically, had a smaller cost because they had no small garden associated with them, and lower flats, certainly in my circumstance, anyway, paid a little bit extra to take that into consideration.

Some shared meters, however, have the ability to have a metering device installed at the owner's expense, and normally a licensed plumber is required to do that. That gives an indication of how much water has been sent through to an individual unit, but it is not my understanding that that's the responsibility of SA Water. That is normally the responsibility of the unit owner, be it a tenanted unit or an owner occupied unit.

In that regard, SA Water's responsibility is to the meter and, whoever is the owner of that property, be it, as I said, a strata unit or an individual owner/occupier or if it is a shared meter, it is the responsibility of the owners to determine how that cost is to be shared across that meterage.

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