Are you saying that many properties in Tasmania have no water meter?I was in Tas for the first time in May this year and the towns on the east coast advertised that they had water restrictions.Is this usual for towns on the east coast to have a shortage of water?
The north coast seemed to have had plenty of rain.
Homes in urban Hobart generally don't have meters. And for those that do have meters (such as mine) they aren't actually read and there is no water charge based on consumption.
Basic situation in Hobart is that water is a worthless by-product of upstream power generation. More than enough flows down the Derwent to supply every state capital city (in full) in Australia and then some. Given that Hobart only uses 1% of it with the rest running straight into the sea, there's not much point worrying about it.
It's different on the East Coast however with very low rainfall (around 500mm in a normal year), minimal water infrastructure and a decade of severe drought that only ended this winter. Those areas do have water shortages, and in most cases meters, but the underlying problem is lack of infrastructure rather than any inherent inability to supply water to these areas.
Basically in Tas we've got a ridiculous amount of water, 12% of all the fresh water in Australia, and we use it to run virtually the entire state on hydro-electricity (93% of all power in Tas being from hydro). But that's it. Irrigation is ad-hoc and largely a downstream by-product of the Hydro's operations. Urban water supply is much the same - it works fine where it's downstream of Hydro operations (eg Hobart, Launceston and parts of the North-West coast) but is close to pathetic elsewhere due to lack of storage, pipelines and investment in general.
My basic point is that it's a waste of time measuring how much water I'm using in urban Hobart. It would be far more useful to spend the money on actally fixing the problems on the East Coast etc. The cost of maintaining the pipes etc isn't going to drop if consumption falls, all the meters do is add another cost rather than fixing anything. That's a point that's been repeatedly made by countless people since the 1950's whenever the meter pushers have surfaced. My expectation, and that of many, is that the real purpose of metes is essentially a revenue raising operation.
As for Melbourne, well there's already an assortment of cables (communications and power) across Bass Strait a well as a gas pipe plus various oil/gas platforms and thier associated pipelines. How about adding a water pipeline from Tas to Vic?