 I'll be introducing Tony, I've done some work with her in the past I'm from the Institute for Sustainable Futures My name is Dean Pham and we've had a working relationship for the last couple of years working with some communities in King Lake in Victoria So, I'm excited that I will be introducing Tony under their work So, I mean this is a great... I mean it's fantastic how the second keynote speak after my brief talk We have very different perspectives here on water management and social dimensions of water management Tony Meek is a community engagement manager for Yarra Valley Water What's interesting about Yarra Valley Water for people who are international guests it's probably one of the most innovative water authorities in Australia I would say and Zoe might be able to... I agree And innovative in a number of different ways In my work with Tony at Yarra Valley we've had really close relationships with the users of new technologies and supporting them in adopting for example, the integrated water system in the King Lake and the urine diversion toilet system and they actually had input into the direction of the trial when we set this up two years ago So, I just wanted to mention also I was thinking about in the early stages of planning this conference we were talking about how it wouldn't be great to have industry involved somehow in sharing our perspectives on these social dimensions of water management and we're lucky enough to have Tony give a keynote at the conference but I think also it is really important to note that it wouldn't be great to be able to hear about what innovative sort of practices are happening at the water industry as well within an innovative water utility and sort of have this sharing back and forth of what we're doing it's not just about theorising about potentially what could happen in the water industry but actually sharing what could happen on the ground so I'm really happy that we can have Tony and Tony involved and in the break we were speaking about Marguerite's presentation and thinking it wouldn't be great if Marguerite could come to Yarra Valley Water and he talked to engineers they need it more in Sydney yeah that's true at least the community engagement team are really open to doing those sort of things inviting someone in to discuss those sort of issues so you know if you have a look at Tony's sort of job descriptions throughout her working life this is one word that becomes really apparent as community, engaging community and Tony's various roles involved you know a great deal of linkages between bringing different groups together to resolve issues in which we're concerned and these range from developing you know housing options for disadvantaged groups and she worked as an academic in social work working with families in crisis in the role in environmental disputes and the current role involves working in the water industry on water delivery options so advocating for the importance of recognising the social context as a core foundation for successful project delivery Tony has a particularly interest in how knowledge and experiences of the community and stakeholders can be continuously used to improve project planning and service delivery meeting better customer demands as well as you know producing maybe alternative services of provision, sanitation and water provisions so I think maybe it's better to introduce Tony and introduce the presentation than me to go on any further so I'd like to introduce Tony Thank you very much for inviting me here today it's a real privilege to be able to come and meet with so many people of diverse backgrounds doing some really interesting research and for me to have an opportunity to hear about that and find out a bit more about what you do and also for me to be able to perhaps share with you some of the applications of what's happening in our sort of research and sort of knowledge acquisition activities in what happens on the ground in terms of day to day service delivery with a water utility so while my talk is entitled water genders, culture politics, water governance inside and outside the home it's a pretty broad interpretation of something so I'm going to give you my views on it and I'll just start off by saying in that day to day day in the life type of approach in a water utility sometimes I feel a bit like how that dog looks just at the minute so I was trying to find an engaging picture to start this talk off and I thought that sums it up so so I hope that hope you'll see what I mean that could be one way of looking at or to even avoid it if you equate those people with other people who I won't mention but anyway let's move along shall we now my the overview today I want to give you is to talk about how water governance plays out within a service delivery context at Yarra Valley water I want to then talk a little bit about our stakeholder and community engagement approaches and then talk about a particular case study that's still a work in progress and give you an update on a piece of what we consider to be innovative water service delivery in an urbanised area in a suburb of Melbourne called Doncaster so that's going to encapsulate my talk today so like any talk I want you to go away with some sort of key messages about what I think is important in the work that we're trying to do across stakeholder and community engagement and the things that we've learnt have been that really strong investment in effective engagement and ongoing stakeholder liaison and community engagement does build greater community and stakeholder confidence in what we're trying to do I think also building a very strong internal organisational culture encouraging that effective collaboration and working on it and working on it can really lead to more successful project delivery and just as a little aside the water's been working for about the past 10 or 11 years on its internal culture using human synergistics as a sort of a basis for doing that and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised when I started at Yarra Valley Water to really see how the benefits of that which includes aspects of working more collaboratively across disciplines was really playing out in a way that I hadn't ever seen evident before in other places that I'd worked and that continues to be the case and we're building from strength to strength and I'd have to say in my role in community and stakeholder engagement we've got a really strong foundation and basis to keep moving forward in a very positive way and the last point that probably has been a lot of my work over the last 20 years in environmental dispute resolution where roads are very rocky that for more social projects while the road ahead may be bumpy having those investments in strong relationships with stakeholders in the community can make it easier to find solutions when the bumps appear which inevitably they will so there's three key points that I wanted to point out that are probably the key messages that I hope you go away with from today's presentation so what I'd like to do now is just set the scene for a little bit of the operating context for the water industry in Victoria and in my paper I talk a little bit about Yarra Valley water but for those of you who are from interstate and overseas and probably don't know that much about us we're a water retailer we operate out of the we're one of the biggest well the biggest in Melbourne and there's three metropolitan retailers we have a customer base of 1.7 million people and we provide water and sewerage services so that's the gist of the basics of what Yarra Valley water does so for us working in the water industry it's been a very challenging time and other speakers previously have talked about the drought in Australia and as a result of the drought we've had a major shift in community attitudes towards water in the past 10 years we've really spent a lot of time in Victoria as have other states looking at new supply augmentations that have caused prices to more than double so our customers are feeling the pain of that there's a lot of debate about management of urban water systems and the value that water utilities like us deliver to our customers we are regulated we have what's called the Essential Services Commission who are increasingly keen to ensure that our customers do get value for money in what we provide for them and large infrastructure projects have a long planning lead time and it started to rain again and I think that's a really important point in terms of the challenges for us in delivering our services in 2012 and beyond we've also in Yarra Valley we take up an area of a major growth corridor in Melbourne so we've got a lot of greenfield planning going on at the moment and in those greenfield areas if you like we've got a lot of mandated third pipe solutions i.e. we're going to be supplying a recycled water supply to those properties and we are also faced with redevelopment in already urbanised areas so we've been trying to explore different ways of providing services particularly through integrated water management approaches and we now have a community too that has greater access to information from ever before lots of different communication channels people trying to put their perspective and not always giving the full picture we have people who are increasingly time poor our social research for example tells us that people don't particularly care if it's Yarra Valley water delivering the service, our brand they just want to know that when you turn the tap on it works and when you hit the button on the toilet it flushes that's pretty much all most people care about we are also engaging with a community that's increasingly mistrustful of governments and the corporate sector and i think that's to my way of thinking being the result of probably well-intentioned approaches to consult and engage but really really risk averse types of thinking in terms of what people have been prepared to do so people are getting burnt, they're feeling cynical and mistrustful every time an agency like ourselves or others come out and say hey we need to consult with you about this and people are saying why should we bother the policy context and project delivery disconnect is another important consideration I think when you're looking at canvassing community opinion about broad policy matters and if we take our 1.7 million people who are customers and recently have been engaging about our water plan which is a five year plan of funding that we provide to the essential services commission in terms of determining what our priorities are in terms of projects and service delivery now I think at that level it becomes really hard to really think what can be an effective engagement approach and I think the tradition has been to think we could probably try targeting key stakeholder representative groups and then have the odd town hall meeting and then because it's difficult we'll do this amount of work because at the moment it's really hard to get people to be interested in something but I think we've got to try harder at these sorts of approaches because these broad policy questions may not be relevant when you're talking very in a very abstract way but as soon as a new piece of infrastructure is going to be your new neighbour you certainly start to take a bit more notice in what's involved and I think we have to work smarter in how we understand and engage with the great wilderness that is the community in that regard now I as I was trying to sort of think about this talk and it may not come out too clearly so I'll read this out but I read the age every morning and there's a reading poll every day I know it's really not sound statistics but I think it just highlights for me some of the things that people are most important I'll just pick out one or two for those of you who may not know there's a wonderful horse called Black Caviar most people have heard of Black Caviar and I just haven't read something when she raced at Royal Ascot and then she had her injury and the opinion was does Luke Nolan deserve criticism for his winning ride on Black Caviar 18,110 people responded to that particular question now then you look at where's another one there are our politicians putting politics ahead of oh I can't read that it's sort of come out but ahead of the causes of asylum seekers 2,682 votes oh lies yeah sorry so in other words you know a lot of us in this room would see that as a really important question and Black Caviar has clearly captured the minds and hearts of many people more than asylum seekers in that regard if you were very black and white about it but I started to put my presentation together when I was reflecting a bit more on some of the challenges around community cynicism and you'll see as I discuss the case study why I was probably in a bit of a darker thought process at the time and then just recently I was reading the Saturday age and Looney had a cartoon that I just couldn't resist because welcome to our world in what we are trying to do in delivering policy so I'll just let you read that but I think it's pretty clear again it's a bit of another example of the Black Caviar for example where the matters that are significant to society at large we would all agree in principle are kind of not as well read as others like Nude Mum Stork's injured footy stone so I just thought that summed up a lot of what it's like going to work some days for me so oh look it's not quite that bad okay so this is sometimes what our work feels like so who do people really trust that probably isn't us but it's likely to be someone just like them somebody who just lives up the road and why is that the case well if you consider some of the wider policy analysis and debates around climate change and governance that are happening at the moment in the media these are arguably diminishing the significance of and the public's views of this important issue and there's been quite a lot of commentary happening at the moment about this and I recently received a copy from the Victorian Women's Trust of a switch in time restoring respect to Australian politics and I want to give that a little bit of a plug it's only been released in the last month or so but it's a really important commentary on the way politics are being played out the lack of civility in conversations and debates and just some of the challenges that the current federal government has in relation to trying to govern a country being a minority government so I commend you to read that because to me it really gives a very good picture of the kinds of challenges that our community is facing as a whole and I think this aspect of civility is really apparent in everyday matters of water governance in the sort of work that we do in having to cite important pieces of infrastructure in communities where they would rather not have them or having to disrupt them because they don't want to dig up the street or take away a little bit of public land for a couple of years to build a new sewer and how those things impact on communities Another thing that I just want to mention in how our research informs our approach is that we are constantly monitoring and we are trying to really make sure that we do understand what our stakeholders think of us and how we approach things we do this quite regularly and our intention is to take on board the feedback and really act on it and make sure that we do listen to what stakeholders and the community is telling us so the last piece of research that we did was in 2011 and as you can see from the points that we were very positively reviewed by our stakeholders those last two points about being collaborative and leading and also being customer focused and our work culture have been really praised by our stakeholders but there were a couple of things that we learned about from our stakeholders that we are still trying to get our act together more on which is this whole tension that we have between sharing and leading where good ideas and some interest could be excluded so subtext of that is I think sometimes we can be still a little bit arrogant and we need to keep working on making sure our communication with customers and the way we deliver our services are as efficient as possible so a couple of pieces of things that we are trying to look at in terms of being more collaborative but by and large we have got some really good feedback our customer research which I will just leave you to read for a moment is also giving us some really important information that is heartening for us but it also gives us a few little challenges in how we go about delivering the services and point three in particular is what I want to mention the anxiety about how the drought was managed and the augmentations that have been commissioned subtext for that would be the current controversy that we have around the construction of a de-cellination plant in Victoria that hasn't still continues to create a lot of community angst and you may have read in the media or heard of recent times where the community has to pay for that and prices are going to go up considerably as a result in order to be able to do that so I have just tried to give you a bit of a basis for how our research informs our actions in what we do in keeping with the theme of this conference looking at combining the sciences, humanities and social science research I just want to just for a few moments look at how that all comes together and I'll just make a couple of points of that and show you a wonderfully fabulous diagram that looks and links it all together and then I'll just give you the how it plays out in reality with this particular project that I'm going to talk about so for a day-to-day water utility for us it's making sure our customer stakeholder research does inform and guide our project planning and service delivery and that we do encourage cross-disciplinary involvement in project delivery from inception through to actual completion so I wanted to just give you a little bit of an overview of how we do that we have a broad corporate strategy obviously our brand is important to us stakeholder engagement is critical to us by the key stakeholders there I'm referring to our major shareholder which is the Victorian Government and other key Government agencies and bodies and then we have the community our customers, the people who are directly or indirectly impacted by our project work and then the corporate stakeholders that we have to also keep in mind and then making sure that the way we run our business flows into that whole framework of sorts so that's just to give you a bit of a snapshot of how we do that so coming out of that I just want to talk a little bit about community engagement and the sort of principles that we try to inform our practice and that is that communities have a right to be involved in the key decisions that affect them and their environment that there are a range of diverse perspectives and opinions and expertise out there that can enhance our decision making and that effective engagement depends on trust mutual respect and clear communication so those are really important principles for us to anchor our work so while we do the way we do that is by regularly keeping people informed keeping them involved asking for opinions and feedback on our activities seeking their commitment to follow our advice and while the drought was on for example water saving we had tremendous success in really getting people's behaviours to change in terms of water conservation and people really embraced that which was terrific it's important for us to honour our commitments and lastly working with us on changes and I think that's what Dina was alluding to in her introduction to where we are trialling some quite innovative servicing solutions but they are fundamentally going to change the way people behave and adapt to these technologies and that sort of thing is going to be increasingly paramount in I think in water services and their delivery into the future and we have to work closely with our customers because we are in many respects asking them to really shift their attitudes on some fairly complex and sensitive things so for our community engagement team how does this play out in a project in the ideal world we hear about the idea when it's first being considered I use the word ideal because that's a work in progress we in engaging with our engineers in designing projects have become more part of the initial project team which is a great thing because we can an example of what we do there is when an engineer says I need to do this project we'll say fine okay first step we're coming out to you to see where this is happening we encourage site visits and we it's a mandatory requirement if we're going to work with them we go out and look where this thing is going or whatever it is because you can learn so much from doing that rather than sitting at a computer screen looking at an aerial map we get involved in the conversations and discussions with our project management managers that ensure that all project dimensions are being considered so we're pretty much the community advocates we're there to sort of suggest ideas or this is how this might be received we contribute to the risk assessment conversations by increasing that advocacy particularly with our ongoing liaison with stakeholder and interest groups we can have a fairly current kind of idea of what people's issues and concerns are and then we put all that together to help in the final project design so that's how the theory of it works how does it work in practice well I think on the less tricky projects where the risks are rather low about community perceptions it's easier to kind of aspire to have to implement best practice principles but sometimes on the more tricky controversial projects potential controversy shouldn't equal risk aversion in our thinking but it sometimes does and that can be often played out in the timing and the extent of engagement and particularly when we're working with government bodies and politicians who like to make announcements about things and the timing of when we're able to talk about it and we continue to work on ways to avoid these kinds of scenarios developing because when things do start to feel a little bit I think contentious I think while we might be wanting to be open and collaborative that pressure can sometimes get us to revert to type which for some some people in the water industry the word controlling is something that is used a bit in a lot of and a lot of government agencies too control control and we've got to control this because if we don't it'll all just go haywire and we'll be out of control and there'll be outrage and all the rest of it well hello that's going to happen anyway so why not design something that's going to really tackle that and address that I would say so for us about these kinds of complex matters it's important that we do think about it from that point of view where you are really trying to keep that engagement that communication open it's fair it's equitable and inclusive that we share we have a shared purpose in what we're trying to do with what we do with our projects that we improve the quality of engagement with learning from experience we try to debrief when we have a project completed and what have we learned and what we can take into the future so that we can avoid the mistakes of the past and having a shared ownership of the issues is really comforting that it kind of enables all viewpoints to be reflected and I think that old adage of through conflict better decisions are made with your own colleagues is a really important one that should be thought of very carefully it's important that we are not the experts and the presentations that I've heard so far that throughout the day have really emphasised a lot of different ways of acquiring knowledge and sharing experience and we should be open to that and we should also make sure that when we are delivering these sorts of projects that we are constantly trying to provide accurate and timely information. Now I want to just turn to give you an example of a project that we're in the middle of determining which is Doncaster Hill and it's part of the Victorian Government's 2030 planning framework located I don't know if many people know Melbourne but there's a Westfield shopping town which is one of those big shopping complexes approximately 20km east of Melbourne and the CBD and the plan is to have a lot of high rise offices, apartments and retail outlets and over the next 10 years approximately 4,000 new dwellings are going to be built and we've developed a strategy on how to service that particular community using a third pipe with the Council which is Manningham City Council so the reason we're doing this is the challenges associated with the potable water supply system being there be extra demand we've mandated what we call a Class A Recycled Water Scheme in the area so all new dwellings need a third pipe in the future which is quite revolutionary for an infill development in an urban setting and the recycled water will be available to be used for toilet flushing in the laundry and garden watering we're going to reduce water consumption by up to 30% and reduce the amount of nutrients into Port Phillip Bay which is an issue for the environment and use less energy than with a conventional servicing approach it's actually going to involve mining the sewer and constructing a treatment plant within a residential setting I've given you a bit of an artist representation of what it might look like and that was in the proposed location and things have changed a little bit since then we've been having to look at all the challenges associated with doing that which is that it is going to be close up and personal to some people people have been concerned about the operation of it concerned about property values has required a planning permit and an EPA works approval and public consultation has been part of that we have developed quite an extensive engagement strategy where we did aspire to adhere to all the principles that I've just alluded to in the earlier part of my presentation and trying to be as proactive as we can with people so what happened however was the council decided to reject the planning permit application even though it was a partnership with us subtext for that is the council elections were just held and the planning process took a bit longer than we thought and councillors were feeling uncomfortable about not being re-elected I suspect in the meantime EPA and Victoria approved the works approval but we've decided we're not going to pursue the project in that location there's a little bit of hiatus at the moment but we remain committed to delivering recycled water to that area and considering the best options I just want to reflect quickly on some of the media that we've had in that thing before I finish up which is that we've got some really diverse opinions about these sites kinds of things we've had the anti not in my backyard type of people and we've had people that are saying hang on this is a really important project for the community so we've got some quite interesting debate going along at the moment and this former councillor didn't stand for re-election but probably sums it up in terms of how a lot of us have been feeling and thinking about this particular project but I think in summary and in conclusion I would just like to just make a few points about what I think innovation does for us will continue to do this kind of work but we have to be clear about what we are consulting about and what constitutes meaningful involvement with stakeholders in the community how we go about timing these things which often can be constrained by other things like the political landscape and announcements and wanting to keep things a little bit behind the scenes until an announcement is made for example we're getting lots of good feedback that these are important projects to do from the broader community but citing them is a challenge in itself it's really important to keep everybody up to date with issues externally as well as internally and I think in a large organisation that's really important that you can sometimes lose sight of that and that lastly innovation can sometimes cost the community more in monetary terms but be more sustainable so how do we keep people on the journey along to get that support so to sum up and this is something that I've been wanting to do this since I've finished my master's thesis but I think it sums up my daily work life like the dog so in the very topography of professional practice there is the high hard ground overlooking the swamp on the high ground manageable problems lend themselves to solution through the application of research based theory and technique swampy lowland messy confusing problems defy technical solution bracket my work our work the irony of this situation is that the problems of the high ground tend to be relatively unimportant to individuals or society at large however great their technical interest may be while in the swamp like the problems of greatest human concern so my thought is that we just have to keep getting our feet wet thank you great thank you presentation and thank you for using the old shun quote which I used too and I think it's a great one I guess I had three questions but your shun quote brought up the fourth one so perhaps it's the matter question if you wanted to innovate more in the space that you occupy does the constraint come from the community or does it come from the organization and worldviews of your colleagues so that's the matter question and below that I had some questions about how you differentiate between stakeholders, customers, consumers what's the boundary on those sorts of issues and and a question about differentiating between the idea of a stakeholder and actually how you engage in processes that build someone's stakeholder so that you don't assume that they're all about with the stakeholder yes well I'll try and do that briefly I think I'd probably sum up by what you're saying is that there's a lot of tensions and contradictions that we have to deal with and I think the thing that I find is really important is to just really be open and listen and receptive and really identify the issues needs and interests of each parties that helps I think then define the state they want to have in it or how they might like to be involved and then importantly ask them how they want to be engaged don't assume anything so I'm really, really I'm really, really strong in trying to keep that personal contact to be able to review and continuously think well are we on the right track here and almost like a piece of action research and getting feedback that can help us to tweak the process so that's a very amorphous way of answering your question but I've probably left a little bit out as well but can I just re-ask raise number two well it was just Tony I really enjoyed the presentation too but I sort of picked up on the difference between community and customer I know as a water retailer of course it makes sense for you to talk about customers and yeah it struck me that Yarra Valley in terms of its engagement and so on like a customer is somebody who you know goes and buys a commodity who doesn't have a lot of other than buying power who's not a it's not an enfranchised position it's not a you know political position it's not a position of responsibility all you've got to do as a customer is to consume whereas when you talk about somebody who's a community member or a stakeholder or something you talk about people who are presumed to be citizens they might vote they might belong to social institutions they connect with people outside their bathroom like them in the world and that's one of my in research I've done with the water companies I get very confused about how come everybody just goes totally for the customer body even ones like Yarra Valley water that are actually to me seeming to try and have a much more different and richer view of your constituents besides customers so I just wonder if you get tangled up in that I think we do I think we do and I think how can I put this there's this word called marketing and I think the M word let's call it the M word I work in marketing and communications that's our division and I think that's where some of the challenges for us come because I try to differentiate our work within that context in saying yes there's our customers many of them would never meet with us face to face the only contact they'll have is maybe once on the phone or twice look can I query the bill or my meter isn't working or something like that and that may be the only contact we ever have but in our role with some of our infrastructure work we're more up close and personal so that's how I distinguish community or rename our customers become more involved with us than just a simple telephone interaction over the phone I think the most important thing is that we segment out the purpose of what we're trying to communicate about and then and really that helps to then define the kind of relationship we have with them that's the way I'd look at it I think we also get caught up on the branding thing of reputation brand and being a recognised brand which is a little bit interesting when you're a our customers don't have a choice we're a monopoly and so me neither sorry I shouldn't say that take that off the where's the video I think all I'm saying in that is it's a real tension that you have to deal with and I think it's about really clearly defining the issues and interests I try and put it like a negotiation based model over it principle negotiation helps me to think clearly about the project the issues needs interests what can we do to assist that and make sure that we've checked out that those are really the issues needs and interests so we work with the customer in the background going like this and sometimes it has more relevance and not does that help yeah I wanted to go back early on you said some of the challenges of the US organisation and one of them was people getting frustrated that their actions aren't really influencing the bills and I presume that you were able to implement the water saving technologies or practices and not really making an impact in terms of the water usage or in terms of how much they pay for water so I'm just kind of I thought could you explain why that is and how that frustration is manifesting itself and how you can overcome it well I think part of the thing is that my earlier point about people seem to only want to know about the water the tap turning on and the toilet flushing the whole story we'd love to tell about how water pricing happens and how tariffs are determined and all the rest of it that people are too busy to even understand that and it's very complex as well but we really have to try harder at explaining and engaging about that and we the angst comes about usually when we send out our quarterly bills and particularly when we have added charges once a year where we put drainage charge on behalf of the government and Melbourne water and a parks and waterways charge and then the surge of anger just comes back through our contact centre so we have scripts for our contact centre people and so it goes on but one of the things that we've done recently that's been more deliberative I think and is working to some extent that I'd like to see happen on a wider scale is in consulting with our water plan which we've now given sent off to the Essential Services Commission we used a process where we engaged people through a workshop we took a cross-section of our customers in a statistically valid sample asked them to come along to a workshop over four hours paid them to come had a little piece of information gauged the changes in their attitudes based on more information than what they currently knew and by the end of it they understood it and got it a bit more in terms of how these things worked it has to be brought back I think to a point where they can see the relevance and that in terms of water pricing consuming less with the current tariffs doesn't mean you get less you pay less but we're looking at that at the moment in this next round of funding that we're applying for with the Essential Services Commission the other thing that's really hidden in what we do is all those 9000 odd kilometres of pipes we maintain that are all invisible and so at every opportunity if I can when I go to speak to interest groups we'll get hammered about the cost of water and then I'll say by the way those other charges go towards $650 million sewer that we've just put in 12 and a half kilometres underground between Reservoir and Coburg in the northern suburbs of Melbourne to help with that northern growth corridor and they go oh I get it it just takes a little bit more of an opportunity to have a conversation with people where they start to see and can at least accept a little better where their money's going it's an ongoing work in progress