Sydney, Jan 25 (DPA) On the most expensive street in the most expensive suburb in Australia the houses come with heated outdoor pools and industrial-strength air-conditioning.
Welcome to Wolseley Road in Sydney’s ultra-posh Woollahra, where old money mingles with the new and almost everyone has a view of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House.
“People with money want to live with other people with money,” said university sociology lecturer Michael Bounds. “It’s a concept called homophily. We all surround ourselves with circles of friends, with kindred spirits.”
Woollahra people are kindred not only in their wealth. They tend to use a lot more water than other people. The latest annual report from water company Sydney Water shows them getting through twice as much as their counterparts in Leichhardt, an upper-middle class suburb just a bus-ride away.
The figures show the wealthier the suburb the more profligate the householders are with water. Woollahra is tops with 306,000 litres a year.
Water Utilities Minister Nathan Rees has rejected calls for a name-and-shame campaign that would identify water wasters.
Up the coast in Brisbane, the Queensland state government is not so coy. It has promised that it will reveal the identity of households that are well above the average.
Rees reckons the people of Woollahra are the exception and that the city’s 4 million people are getting good at conservation.
“Greater Sydney is now using less water than in 1974, despite a population increase of 1.2 million people,” Rees said.
Thirty years ago, Sydney used 519 billion litres of water compared with 510 billion litres last year. Australians are changing their lifestyles to adapt to the scarcity of water now that climate change is evident in the world’s driest inhabited continent.
“People are really pulling their weight, there’s no doubt,” said Water Services Association deputy director Claude Piccinin.
In Melbourne, the next biggest city after Sydney, water usage last year was down 15 percent on the previous year.
Tim Holding, the water minister in Victoria, said the cut showed that “restrictions have been effective and the government has struck the right balance.”
There are water restrictions in all major cities except Darwin in the far north and Hobart in the far south. The toughest measures are in southeast Queensland, where residents are limited to 140 litres of water a day.
Next on the cards are measures targeted at the water-unwise. Sydney Water is considering a tariff system that would double or treble the cost of water when households went above a set figure.
It’s not something that would worry the blue-chip suburb of Woollahra. John Symond, a mortgage broker who has a 12-bathroom monster-mansion on Wolseley Road with its own grass tennis courts, has proposed that big users be allowed to build their own waterfront mini-desalination plants.