 Thank you all for giving me the opportunity to tell you a little bit about my water utility, which is an awful long way from here. I think one of the most interesting things about the water utility that I manage is the size of our footprint. Western Australia is a very large state, and the Water Corporation of Western Australia supplies water, wastewater, and drainage services to all the people across our state. I like to say that we're a state a bit like Texas in the USA, except that we're very large. In fact, in European terms, our state runs from Norway to Portugal, and it runs from Ireland to Berlin. So we cover a very large area, 2.6 million square kilometres, or about a million square miles for our US colleagues. And in that enormous space, we only have about two and a half million people. Even more ridiculously, about two million of those two and a half million people live in Perth, which is in the southwest on the coast, and the other half a million people are spread over an awfully large area. So we have a very large footprint and a challenge of delivering water to people in a number of remote communities and one rather large city. Now, all of that should be reasonably straightforward, and it used to be reasonably straightforward, but if you look at the graph on the left, that is a graph of the runoff into Perth's dams over the last 100 years. And what you can see is that if you go back about 100 years, we had very wet years and very dry years, and the obvious engineering solution was to build large dams to hold the water in the wet years to supply our customers in the dry years. Over time, our climate has visibly changed, so much so that the average runoff into Perth's dams in the last 10 years is less than one-sixth of the 100-year average. We used to talk about drought, and we used to look at drought solutions, but we banned the word drought because drought implies a short-term period of less rain. What we're seeing is an unrelenting change to our climate of drier and drier years. The graph on the right shows our rainfall for this year, the green bars at the bottom are the average rainfall over the long period, the yellow bars are what we've had in this last year, and the dotted cumulative lines show the 30-year average and the 10-year average. What you can see is that we haven't had an average rainfall event in Western Australia or in Perth since 1974, but every year the average is coming down slightly, so eventually we will have an average winter. Our rainfall all falls in about three months of the year, so for us to manage through that has been an enormous challenge. On the east coast of Australia we had a drought at about the same time as our climate really started to dry, but that's been superseded by heavy rainfall events. In our part of the country it just gets drier and drier every year. This has led to a total reform of the water utility across Western Australia, and it's a reform in three parts. We have to reform our water security, we have to reform our efficiency and productivity, and we have to reform our connection to our customers. The first one, reforming our water security, is probably the most important, because it's not much good running a water utility if our customers turn on the tap and nothing comes out. When you look at our supply from our dams, if you go back 100 years, you get an average of 350 billion litres of water from our dams, and Perth uses about 300 billion litres, so it was a pretty stable environment. Last year we got 30 billion litres of runoff into our dams, so we have basically lost Perth's entire water supply over the last 15 years and had to replace it. It's very careless to lose the water supply when you run a water utility, and it's very expensive to replace it. So I realise this is a bit of a complicated slide, but the dotted lines, the very ziggy, zaggy dotted lines, are the runoff into our dams over the last 100 years or so. The blue line, which is going steadily upwards, is the population of Perth, and you can see that Perth has been in an enormous growth pattern. We have in Western Australia abundant iron ore, natural gas, oil, gold, nickel, every mineral you can think of, but it's the iron ore that's boomed particularly in the last few years and is very much fuelling the engine that's the growth of China. So growth in iron ore has meant a huge growth in our state's population. Now you can see a few things from this graph. The yellow line at the bottom is the amount of water we've supplied to Perth, and I think one of the most startling things to see is that over the last decade, Perth's population has grown by a third, and yet the amount of water we supplied last year to our customers is 8% less than it was a decade ago. So whilst our customers still use a lot of water, they're using at least a third less than they were a decade ago. So let's have a little look at where the water comes from and what we've done about climate resilience. So this is the water that we supplied from our dams to supply the people of Perth. And you can see that in the early years of Perth as a city, most of our water, if not all of our water, came from dams. But it was pretty clear as time went on that that wasn't going to cut it, so we were lucky to augment that water with groundwater. And this is water from the aquifers that we have under our city, and that's really filled the gap as we developed climate resilient sources. We've probably somewhat over-abstracted some of those groundwater sources over that period, and we're now in a restorative phase. By the early 2000s, it was clear we needed to do something more and simply look for natural water sources, and we started a journey for seawater desalination. And those blue bars show where seawater desalination has been part of our water story. And more recently, our latest water source is groundwater replenishment, where we're taking highly treated wastewater, putting it through UFRO, UV, and then injecting it into our very deep aquifers for future potable use. So that kind of closes the water cycle and fills in the gap. But to put some of this into context, and before I talk a little bit about the cost to our customers of all of this, I thought I'd show you where our water supply comes from, from some dates that to me are very important in the water industry, but nobody else probably thinks they are. And I'm going to start with 1958. Now, 1958 is a very important year in the West Australian water industry, because that's the year I was born. So when my mother was bathing me in a baby bath in 1958, the water in my bath came 97% from Perth's dams and 3% from groundwater from the aquifers underneath us. Now, by 1980, which was the year I finished university, that water supply had already started to change. So when the time it took me to grow up, go to school, go to university and be ready to join the workforce, Perth's water supply had moved from 97% from dams to 65% from dams. So 2 thirds came from dams, 1 third from groundwater. Now, by 2004, which was the year I joined the water industry, I spent a long time working in construction, and when I joined the water industry, in the time it had taken me to gather enough skills to be able to be of use to the water industry, Perth's water supply had swapped from 2 thirds dam water, 1 third groundwater, to the other way round, 1 third dam water, 2 thirds groundwater. So since 2004, in the 10 years that I've been in the water industry, we've seen even more fundamental change to Perth's water supply. Right now, only 7% of the water I supply to my customers comes from Perth's dams. 50% of it comes from seawater desalination and the rest largely from groundwater with an increasing component coming from groundwater replenishment and recycled water, and that number is growing very rapidly. Our desalination plants are, we believe, the best in the world. We have two large plants, one in Perth and one south of Perth. One produces 50 gigalitres of water per annum, the other 100 gigalitres of water per annum, and both of them were the most energy efficient on the planet on the day they were opened, and the environmental monitoring that we do on our plants is second to none. I think the Australian water story is not so much one about water resilience but about environmentally sound water resilience. Our plants are powered by energy that we purchase from renewable generators. Our Perth plant is powered by energy purchased from a wind farm and our southern seawater plant, the one south of Perth, is powered 1 third by solar energy and 2 thirds by energy produced from a wind farm. Both of our plants were built in partnership with the private sector. The Water Corporation funded them, but our private sector partners constructed them and operate them for 25 years, and these are competitively bid processes, but once the bidding is over we partner and share risks. Our first plant was in a partnership with Degromont, our second plant in a partnership with Technicas Reionidas and Valerita from Spain, and both of our plants are fabulous, and without them the people of Western Australia won't be able to have gardens because our summers go for up to nine months, they're very hot, there's no summer rain at all, and we live on basically beach sand. The breakthrough for us though has been in the move to groundwater replenishment, which really changes the whole water cycle for Western Australia. I know groundwater replenishment is used in California and other parts of the world. For us we're treating this water to drinking water standards through an 11 log removal process, but the real breakthrough for me is not the technical aspects of groundwater replenishment, it's the fact that we have more than 92% of our community totally supporting this is Perth's next water source. We're under construction to build a 14 billion litre per annum plant. At the moment the plant is quite small, we're augmenting it to, which is about 200 cubic metres a day, and that plant enjoys great support from our community because we spent 10 years taking our community on a journey, including three years running a trial plant with a very large visitor centre and I think just about every school child in our state has been to visit our visitor centre. More importantly, they've brought their mothers with them because the people who most influence the public view of safe water for the future are mothers. Groundwater replenishment I think is really going to close the water cycle for us in Western Australia and it also enables us to bank water in our very deep aquifers, the aquifer we're injecting in is over a kilometre deep and we're the only licensed abstractor from it, so we're actually helping to pressurise that aquifer, gives us a great cheap water conveyance source because we can pressurise the aquifer in one point, abstract the water quite some distance away and we don't have to build a pipeline or pump anything. So it's been a great story for us, but really in part of that the key part to making it all work has been reducing per capita water use. I always think that the water industry must be just about the only industry that spends millions of dollars on advertising campaigns telling our customers not to buy our product. Every year we reward the customers who have bought the least of our product. It's a very strange economic model, but in a time of scarce resources it also defers very large capital investments and you can see that our water supply per capita is dropping all the time and we're very proud of the work we've done and we're very proud of our community because we've made these changes by partnering, by partnering with our customers, by partnering with industry. We have water-wise garden nurseries, water-wise garden centres, water-wise irrigators, water-wise plumbers. You struggle in Western Australia to find a non-water-wise toilet, to find a non-water-wise shower head, so we've built in a lot of water-saving appliances in our customers' homes. We also, because we get all of our rain in a very short period of the year, have a total sprinkler ban so you can't water your garden in the winter. Most people have sprinkler bans when it's summer and they have a water shortage. We have our winter sprinkler ban because it's raining, so we tell our customers to save water for a sunny day, not to save for a rainy day. Working with our customers has seen the biggest changes we could have made. If you look at the water we've saved, we are now saving over 100 billion litres a year. Now, to have built a new diesel plant to produce that amount of water would have cost us well over $2 billion, so we're making enormous savings to our customers. And the biggest changes have been in outdoor water use. Perth is a hot city. We have a lot of outdoor water use. We have a lot of gardens. We're a very sprawled city. We sprawl north to south, nearly about 280 kilometres, so we're a very large, sprawled city. I think our footprint is about the size of Los Angeles, but our population is about one-fifth the size of that. So we've done a lot of work on securing water, and that reform was all-consuming for the last decade in our organisation. But it led to the second phase of reform, which is about efficiency and productivity, because all of those new water sources come at a cost to our customers. The water from our dams costs about 50 cents a kilometre. The water from our groundwater is about $1 a kilometre. Our diesel water is about $2 a kilometre. So our customers have moved increasingly to more expensive water sources. So it's incumbent on us to work to make our operating costs as low as possible for those customers. And this has seen an emergence over time of increasing partnerships with the private sector. Pre-the 1980s, out my utility did everything ourselves. We employed over about 20,000 people. We did our own construction, our own engineering design, and all our own operations. We outsourced our construction gradually through the 80s and 90s and have subsequently outsourced and partnered for delivery of much of our operations and maintenance. Over the years, we've increasingly partnered in different ways, culminating in a PPP that we have for one of our large water treatment plants at the moment where we don't even own that particular asset. But our preferred method of constructing new sources and operating our business is by an alliance with the private sector. And in these alliances, we share the risk. If we come in under our set budget, our partners and the water corporation share the underrun, but our ongoing operating budget is reduced. So every year, those savings have to be sustainable for both parties. And this journey has been one that's seen us partner with the very best organisations in the water industry for our mutual benefit. We absolutely recognise the need for our private sector partners to make a profit and we want them to make a profit by doing things in a better and more efficient way. But we also recognise our need to keep our costs low and make them sustainably low and that's why this alliance works well for us. The other joy of an alliance contract is that I can second my young staff to work in the private sector and retain them and retain their skills. So in the future, my organisation remains an informed buyer of skills and we don't have all the knowledge in one part of the equation. The private sector can bring learnings from other jurisdictions and can help us to benchmark with the world's best and my staff can help to push and challenge that and understand local conditions so we really get an exceptional result. Most of that happens in Perth, in the city. In that vast rest of our state, we still self-perform and we've been through an enormous bottom-up time and motion study type process. We've automated our scheduling and we've released one-third of the capacity of the labour that we used to have. So an organisation that in the early 1980s had about 20,000 people. We currently employ under 3,000 direct employees and we have partner organisations of about another 2,000. So we're a big organisation spread over a big footprint but our efficiency drive has been huge and in real terms, despite the huge increase in climate independent water sources our cost per service is the lowest of any capital city in Australia. Now the final part of our reform journey is the reform of the customer connection because all of the changes that we've been making can only happen when your customers are on board. We now have online and social media interactions with our customers so that the parts of our business that have smart metering which are largely the parts with very expensive water sources where it's in our interest to cut water usage those customers can go online at any time and see the immediate water use that's happening in their home. The rest of our customers have meters read every second month and that's available to them online. We'll put data loggers into our customers for a very nominal fee so they can register what's happening in their business and since we started that process one in five of our customers who put data loggers on have found leaks on their side of the meter of greater than 20% so we've found huge water leaks. We've made enormous efficiencies in our system through this process and we're working now on processes to better understand each individual customer's needs and wants. For example, if we have a customer who lives on a large property with a large block and a big garden we are sending water wise messages and helping them with garden use with mulching their garden with soil improvement. Those messages don't make any sense to someone who might live on the top floor of a large apartment block and they have different water uses and different needs. Some of our customers want to engage with us and find tips and tools to do better with their water use. Other customers are very happy to pay their bill and never engage with us at all. To me the real change in everything we do is not about our technology, it's not about our engineering skills, it's about our listening skills and to me the water utility of the future has to have great technology, has to have great engineers but the most important requirement for the engineering and the utilities that we see for the future is relationship building and the ability for people in water utilities to listen to the community, to listen to industry, to listen to their partners and most importantly to listen to their customers so that the solutions we develop we develop in real partnerships. The goal of the Water Corporation is to partner with everyone for the benefit of everyone and at the end of the day that leads to robust discussions but until we accept that the days of the engineer standing up and telling everyone what's good for them are over we're never going to proceed. So I put it to you that the challenge for every one of you who works with or for or in partnership with a water utility anywhere in the world is to understand that the most important organs in your body to use at work every day are these two on the side of your head and if you can listen to your customers and truly understand their needs and wants and goals then I think the future for water utilities across the globe is very promising. Thank you.