State and territory pricing regulators should implement a best-practice approach to developing a method for the economic level of water conservation. This method should be informed by national research to determine customers' willingness to pay for conservation and their specific capacity to pay. Water utilities should be entitled to recover efficient costs where their customers have demonstrated a willingness for these services.
Without effective water consumption metering, consumers cannot effectively monitor their water use and do not receive price signals to modify their behaviour. While greater use of individual or sub-metering in apartments carries costs and regulatory complexity, transitioning to smart metering would provide an opportunity to unlock additional consumer benefits, including reduced water and energy bills.
Regulators and water utilities should jointly develop pricing models that allow the water utility to recover the costs of individual metering, and the rollout of smart meters, from customers.
To coincide with smart meter rollout, there needs to be improved transparency, complemented by informative user interfaces with meaningful usage data. These could take the form of dedicated mobile phone apps and websites where people can track their consumption.
These tools, along with increased maturity in consumer waste-sorting practices (such as food organics and garden organics), could create a step-change shift in the culture of resource consumption in the home. For more information, see the Waste chapter.
With one in 10 Australians expected to increase their pattern of working from home following the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a greater need to manage the strain on infrastructure networks in suburban areas through managing household resource consumption and associated municipal services.27