Now is an important time for consideration of ways to improve the National Water Initiative (NWI) and its implementation. Despite water issues generally receding in public profile due to the relatively greater availability of traditional water resources over the past few years, it is crucial to prepare now for the next period of significant environmental and economic constraints on water resource availability.
NWI reforms have helped Australia to better cope with the impact of water shortages. Water trading in the southern Murray-Darling Basin, freed up under the NWI, delivered major economic benefits during the severe and prolonged ‘Millennium’ drought, as shown in the National Water Commission’s 2010 publication The impacts of water trading in the southern Murray-Darling Basin2
ASTE considers that the NWI remains a strong vehicle to achieve further reform of Australia’s water sectors, but that there is significant scope to improve its effectiveness. A key weakness of the NWI is in the nature of State Government participation. Due to the voluntary nature of this participation, parochial interests can dominate to the detriment of the overall national reform goals. Systems to encourage greater participation and ownership by the States of the reform process through the NWI could include strategic incentive programs to achieve NWI reforms while offsetting more problematic parochial considerations.
Overall, there needs to be a more committed and less divisive approach to implementation and development of reform through the NWI from all participants. A coordinated and, most importantly, strongly collaborative process of NWI implementation will achieve the most progress in future water reform in Australia. This approach would be facilitated by a greater level of transparency of the scientific, technical, economic and social bases for decisionmaking, and the return to the NWC of the capacity to generate and explore options for future water policy initiatives in a consultative manner.
2 National Water Commission, 2010, The impacts of water trading in the southern Murray–Darling Basin: an economic, social and environmental assessment, Commonwealth of Australia.