Thursday, 21 March 2024

Ministers statements: water policy

Harriet SHING (Eastern Victoria – Minister for Housing, Minister for Water, Minister for Equality) (12:36): It may come as somewhat of a starting point for a lot of excitement that I rise today to talk about water and the innovative work on the ground that South East Water is doing to support sustainable water management and indeed bring down customer bills, a question which I know Mr Davis is keenly attuned to, given that Melbourne continues to have the lowest water bills in the country. Last week I joined Liam at his home in Cranbourne to watch a live installation of his new digital water meter. Liam was around the 100,000th customer to receive a digital water meter, and we do know that South East Water is doing a power of work to make sure that we will see around a million digital water meters installed across its catchment by about 2029–30. We have already seen early leak detection save around 1.25 billion litres of water. That is the equivalent of the annual household usage of about 8000 typical homes. We are rolling out these digital meters for the electorates of Mr Groth, Mr Battin and Mr Rowswell. They will not quite make it to the electorate of Hawthorn, held by the current Leader of the Opposition. But thank you to Liam for inviting me along to see his really significant occasion of the installation of that meter. He was linked up immediately to electronic notifications around the operation of that meter.

I also joined South East Water at the Aquarevo house. This is in Lyndhurst, and it is a really wonderful example of how we are delivering some of the most water-savvy homes in Victoria. There are 467 homes in this estate. They use around 40 to 60 per cent less potable water than a typical household. They are fitted with a range of different mechanisms to make sure that there are technologies, including weather forecasts, to enable release and retention of water. This is making – (Time expired)