The Concerned Waterways Alliance has lodged its submission to the Australian Government’s Second Statutory Review of the Water Act 2007.
Our submission comes from outside the Murray–Darling Basin, but asks a fundamentally national question: why should the strongest protections in Australian water law depend on which side of the Great Dividing Range a river happens to be located?
The Water Act was created in response to the Millennium Drought and established a national-interest framework for managing the Murray–Darling Basin. Nearly twenty years later, climate change, declining inflows and increasing competition for water are placing serious pressure on waterways well beyond the Basin.
Southern Victoria is a clear example. Inflows have declined by up to 20 per cent over the past two decades, many rivers remain flow-stressed or over-allocated, and significant new industrial demands — including hyperscale data centres — are emerging at a time when the available resource is already shrinking.
A national Water Act for a drying continent
During the Water Act Review webinar in July, Independent Reviewer Geoff Leeper raised the question of whether the Act needs to look beyond the Murray–Darling Basin as water security becomes a growing challenge elsewhere in Australia.
CWA’s answer is an unequivocal yes.
We are not arguing that the Murray–Darling Basin Plan should simply be replicated across Australia, nor that States should lose their primary responsibility for managing water.
We are arguing that some fundamental protections should not stop at the Basin boundary.
In Victoria, for example, water use is capped through Permissible Consumptive Volumes, but those caps are not required to reflect an ecologically sustainable level of take. There is no equivalent statewide environmental water recovery mechanism, no independent water compliance regulator, and important forms of interception such as farm dams and plantation forestry can remain largely outside the water accounting framework.
As climate change reduces the water available, these weaknesses become increasingly consequential.
Rivers need an ecological baseline
One of the central recommendations in our submission is for the Water Act’s ecological, water security and climate adaptation objectives to have broader national application.
Water security cannot simply mean securing water for consumptive use. It must include enough water to sustain the river system itself.
That means recognising minimum base flows, end-of-system flows and the longitudinal, lateral and vertical connectivity that allow rivers, wetlands, floodplains and groundwater systems to function.
Without an ecological baseline, water security can amount to little more than securing today’s use while transferring the consequences to waterways and future generations.
Managing the whole river as a living system
The submission also asks the Review to incorporate the Single Living Entity concept into the Act as an interpretive and planning principle.
This means recognising a waterway as one connected system encompassing its headwaters, tributaries, main channel, riparian lands, floodplain, wetlands, connected groundwater and downstream receiving waters.
Decisions about extraction, environmental water, water quality and interception should therefore consider their cumulative consequences across the whole system.
An impact should not effectively disappear from consideration simply because it occurs upstream, downstream, underground or across an administrative boundary.
What CWA is asking for
The submission makes eight principal recommendations, including:
- extending key ecological, water security and climate adaptation objects of the Act beyond the Murray–Darling Basin;
- adopting the Single Living Entity or whole-of-waterway approach;
- requiring the collection of nationally important water information, particularly on farm dams, plantation interception and groundwater;
- introducing binding national water information standards;
- establishing a national definition of water security that includes an ecological baseline;
- requiring large industrial water users, including hyperscale data centres, to be assessed against cumulative catchment limits and publicly report their water use;
- re-establishing an independent national water body with the functions and independence of the former National Water Commission; and
- creating statutory rights for informed community participation in water planning and access to water information.
The opportunity
Australia does not need eight new Basin Plans. But the foundations of good water governance — knowing how much water is actually being taken, protecting an ecological baseline, considering cumulative impacts and independently reporting whether governments are meeting their commitments — should apply wherever Australians depend upon healthy rivers and water resources.
As our submission concludes, the Water Act has an important opportunity to evolve from legislation created in response to one great water crisis into legislation capable of helping Australia prepare for the next.
See the full submission below.