A liitle ignorance

Astonishingly it seems that understanding and communicating the water reforms agreed by Australian governments almost twenty years ago hasn't percolated down to at least one CEO of a water authority that is the direct result of those reforms.  The Council of Australian Governments agreed, in the 1990s, that Australian consumers should know the full cost of collecting and delivering water to their taps.  They would know because they would be paying that price for their water.  One corollary of that reform was the local government councils who could subsidise water prices through their land rates while they also functioned as the water provider, would have their water business taken away

That reform has only now been put in place in Tasmania and SE Queensland.  The latter's water prices must reflect the cost of the infrastructure that successive governments put in place to "drought-proof" Brisbane and the sourrounding townships including the Gold Coast.  But a cone of ignorance seems to have descended over all the participants, with one Gold Coast City councillor (the city is a shareholder in one of the three new water utilities) questioning if the Board of the utility "knew what it was doing" and, so far as one can tell from the newspaper reports, the CEO of Allconnex Water failing to educate councillors in the full context of price increases