I believe that the Australian consumer will support water saving products without a government rebate, if they could easily identify a quality water saving product. To which the WSAA and Wells administrators would reply "we have" with the previous "A" and the current "Star" rating systems. Well, once again I would beg to differ, and in 2003 I did literally beg in order to try to differ. I was given a draft of the new water rating scheme by Mr Alex Szann of Water Services Association of Australia (WSAA) at the time. On the first read it became abundantly obvious to me that this standard had been drawn up by those with little or absolutely no concept of how to govern or implement water saving standards.
Firstly, the standards for washing machines, the washing machines were only judged on water consumption, not their cleaning ability in relation to water use or the amount of power they would consume. The time taken in order to complete the washing load I would have thought would have also been an extremely valuable consideration, in our ever-increasing time poor households. In short a simplistic standard which I would suggest represented an extremely ingenious view of what is required in the total success of implementing water saving standards. I can make this statement because I have all the correspondence and my suggestions which were totally ignored, were reported in trade magazines. The Hon Mr George Cash MLC, Deputy President of the Legislative Council bought the matter to the attention of Government in the Western Australian Parliament; all accepted my suggestions including Government, without any change by the Government in the rebate scheme in Western Australia.
The commercial aspect in my opinion of introducing new standards at this stage is not being fully appreciated by our current administrators. What was not reported at the time was that only top end loading washing machines were manufactured in Australia. While the rebates on front end loading washing machines did save water, at what overall costs. The only thing that saved Australia was the fact that these fully imported front loading washing machines had been tooled to a superior standard based on the experience of the Europeans.
Would it not have been a more practical approach, in after drafting a more comprehensive standard in allowing time for Australian Manufacturers a far greater opportunity to participate in this newly formed Market?
