12th December 2025
The Concerned Waterways Alliance has lodged our submission with the Essential Services Commission as part of Melbourne Water’s 2026 Price Review process. Price determinations play a critical role in shaping not only household water bills, but also the scale, direction, and effectiveness of investment in waterways, wetlands, floodplains, and catchments across Greater Melbourne and the Port Phillip and Western Port region.
While Melbourne Water is often understood primarily as a bulk water and sewerage provider, it also holds statutory responsibility as the regional waterway, drainage, floodplain and catchment manager. This submission examines whether Melbourne Water’s proposed pricing and investment framework is adequate to meet those broader ecological and public stewardship obligations, particularly in light of its own reporting that waterway and wetland health across the region is in long-term decline.
Drawing on Melbourne Water’s Healthy Waterways Strategy mid-term reviews, outcomes performance reporting, and the Commission’s previous regulatory decisions, our submission raises concerns that key environmental programs funded through the Waterways and Drainage Charge have not delivered the outcomes promised in the current pricing period. We highlight ongoing losses of natural wetlands and headwater streams, worsening stormwater impacts, and a growing disconnect between reported “customer outcomes” and documented ecological decline. As such we argue that reducing the Waterways and Drainage Charge to cover for increases in other charges is not appropriate and postpones rehabilitation costs which will need to be picked up by future generations.
The submission also addresses major omissions in Melbourne Water’s price proposal, most notably the lack of a clear, evidence-based response to the rapidly escalating water demands of hyperscale data centres. These emerging industrial loads have significant implications for water security, desalination reliance, household costs, and the recovery of environmentally stressed rivers and wetlands, yet they are not meaningfully incorporated into demand forecasting, scenario modelling, or tariff design.
Finally, the submission invites the Essential Services Commission to consider whether its regulatory framework gives sufficient weight to Melbourne Water’s environmental, cultural, and intergenerational responsibilities. It argues that waterways should not be treated as discretionary service outcomes, but as living systems and critical public environmental infrastructure whose protection requires transparent, adequately funded, and ecologically grounded investment decisions.
This submission is offered as part of the Alliance’s ongoing commitment to improving accountability, transparency, and outcomes for Victoria’s waterways, and to ensuring that future pricing decisions genuinely support the protection and restoration of the rivers, creeks, wetlands and catchments on which communities and ecosystems depend.