Water Security & Thriving Regions

Most of the Murray–Darling Basin lies in New South Wales, which makes this state the keeper of Australia's most contested river system. The mass fish kills at Menindee — across the summer of 2018–19, estimated in the hundreds of thousands, and again in March 2023, when deaths were counted in the millions — were a warning about what happens when extraction, drought and weak oversight collide.

The Australian Democrats' position is simple: you cannot manage what you refuse to measure. We support universal, accurate metering of water take — no meter, no pump — completed and enforced, not perpetually phased in. We would keep the Natural Resources Access Regulator strong and properly funded, because compliance only works when the regulator can actually turn up. After years of dispute, floodplain harvesting is finally being licensed and measured; that job must be finished transparently, with volumes, licences and modelling published so communities up and down the river can check the numbers, and total take held within sustainable limits.

New South Wales should meet its Basin Plan commitments honestly and on time — and argue its corner in national negotiations with published evidence, not selective accounting. Every gigalitre should be traceable in a public, near-real-time water register. Sunlight is cheaper than litigation.

That is the argument. What follows is the evidence for it, most of it published in the last eighteen months, and most of it uncomfortable.

Nine years of water reform, and nobody has checked whether it worked

The freshest independent verdict on water regulation in this state is the Auditor-General's performance audit Water management and regulation in NSW, report 427, released on 15 June 2026, which assessed the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, the Natural Resources Access Regulator and WaterNSW. Its conclusion is that "further work is required by DCCEEW, NRAR and WaterNSW to demonstrate whether the implementation of compliance and enforcement measures has been effective in improving the sustainable and integrated management of non-urban water use in NSW" (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026). More pointedly, it found that "DCCEEW has not evaluated the overall environmental, social and economic impacts of the reform agenda or whether it has achieved the objectives of the Water Management Act 2000 ... and the Water Reform Action Plan", and that the two largest reforms of the period — non-urban metering and floodplain harvesting licensing — "were not subject to regulatory impact assessments" (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026). The audit made four recommendations.

Read that carefully, because it is not a claim that the reforms failed. It is a finding that after nine years and a great deal of political capital, the state cannot say either way. A government that cannot evaluate its own reform program is not in a position to tell a community on the Barwon, or an irrigator on the Gwydir, that the settings are right.

Enforcement running on systems built to send bills

The audit is equally direct about why compliance is hard. WaterNSW's systems "were intended to manage water accounts, and were not for regulatory and enforcement purposes", and the resulting data gaps have "created challenges in contacting water users, using data to identify breaches of water rules, and meeting evidence standards required for criminal charges" (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026). This is the practical meaning of "you cannot manage what you refuse to measure": not an abstraction about transparency, but a prosecutor unable to meet an evidentiary standard because the underlying record was designed to raise an invoice.

The remedy is a Water Administration Ministerial Corporation technology roadmap. It was put to the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal at $46.4 million in the 2025 joint pricing submission and revised to $43.96 million over three years to 2029 after IPART's October 2025 determination — $13.46 million for data strategy and governance, $7 million for customer metering systems, $20.92 million for water market systems and $2.58 million for water compliance (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026). WaterNSW has committed to debt-funding the roadmap subject to its own capital governance, and the Auditor-General notes that "None of the water agencies' risk management documentation has adequately accounted for the risk that funding is not available" (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026). The state's ability to police water take now rests on a borrowing decision that has not been finally approved, with no documented plan for the case where it is not.

A regulator that could not report on itself

The same audit records that NRAR paused internal performance reporting during 2025 because its own data could not carry it. An early-2025 committee paper stated that "Performance metrics are consistently inaccurate due to systemic issues at every stage of data processing", and a March 2026 project plan recorded that "NRAR cannot currently demonstrate its regulatory effectiveness with confidence because its business processes, systems, data, and performance reporting are misaligned" (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026). NRAR's 2024 self-assessment against the Modern Regulator Improvement Tool showed performance-reporting maturity had gone backwards since 2022; its outcomes framework was endorsed only in November 2025, and the uplift project is forecast to finish by 30 June 2027 (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026).

The scale being regulated makes the gap matter. The Auditor-General puts the estimated value of water entitlements held in New South Wales at up to $41 billion in 2023, across approximately 40,000 water access licences in rural and regional New South Wales, and records 130 convictions secured by NRAR for breaches of water laws between 2018 and March 2026 (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026).

The case for defending NRAR rather than rebuilding it

There is a temptation, when a regulator's data is this weak, to reach for another restructure. The record argues against it. The Independent Commission Against Corruption's November 2020 report Investigation into complaints of corruption in the management of water in NSW and systemic non-compliance with the Water Management Act 2000 — Operations Avon and Mezzo — found no corrupt conduct, but pointed to "organisational dysfunction" as one of the causes of a regulatory atmosphere that was "... overly favourable to irrigators", and the NSW Ombudsman's August 2018 special report had recommended NRAR "create a positive work culture", both as quoted by the Auditor-General (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026). Those are the conditions NRAR was built to fix.

On the evidence, that part has largely worked. People Matter Employee Survey results cited in the audit show NRAR moving from 43 per cent to 73 per cent agreement that "I would recommend my organisation as a great place to work" between 2017 and 2024, and from 17 per cent to 53 per cent on "Change is managed well" (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026). A regulator that has rebuilt its culture and still cannot prove its effectiveness has a systems and funding problem, not an identity problem. We would fix the systems.

Who pays for the regulator, and why that is delicate

IPART sets maximum prices for non-urban water in New South Wales, paid by customers to WaterNSW and the Water Administration Ministerial Corporation, "as most customers in regional and rural areas do not have a choice for their water supply", with the current determination period running from 1 October 2025 to 30 June 2029 (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026). Rural water users are therefore funding a material share of the measurement systems that make water accounting possible — which is defensible, and also a standing risk. The Auditor-General observes that "it is unusual for a regulator to conceptualise regulated entities as 'customers' and for its funding to be influenced by the views of the regulated community", while noting that fees paid by water users accounted for only around 15 per cent of all NRAR funding between 2019 and 2025 — the majority coming from consolidated NSW Government funding — which "suggests a relatively low risk of capture". NRAR had 217 employees and total funding of $44.82 million in 2024–25 (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026).

The same 2025 IPART determination recommended that the Water Administration Ministerial Corporation establish a website and engage more effectively with stakeholders, and that the Minister for Water initiate a review of the Corporation to improve its governance arrangements (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026). A body that levies charges on rural water users and had, until recently, no website of its own is not a governance detail. It is the kind of thing that corrodes trust in every number the state publishes about water.

The law has been strengthened — that is a beginning, not a result

New South Wales has moved on the legal side. The Water Management Legislation Amendment (Stronger Enforcement and Penalties) Act 2025 (NSW) was enacted "to address legislative challenges that had been identified by NRAR in seeking to enforce water law, most significantly through the introduction of a civil penalties regime that requires the regulator to satisfy in prosecutions the lower civil standard of proof ('balance of probabilities') rather than the criminal standard ('beyond reasonable doubt')" (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026). The Water Management (General) Regulation was also remade in 2025 (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026).

We support the civil penalty regime. A rule that can only be enforced beyond reasonable doubt, using data collected for billing, is a rule in name. But a lower standard of proof is worth precisely as much as the evidence available to meet it, which returns the argument to metering — and there the direction of travel has not been uniform. The 2023 review of non-urban metering extended compliance dates and made telemetry optional for smaller works (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026). Each extension may be individually reasonable. Cumulatively, a rollout that keeps moving is a rollout that regulated parties learn to wait out.

Four water resource plans still outstanding, and New South Wales is alone in that

Under the Basin Plan, each jurisdiction's water resource plans must be accredited. As at the end of June 2026 the Murray–Darling Basin Authority records that four of New South Wales's twenty plans "remain with NSW for final drafting prior to submission for assessment by the MDBA": Gwydir (surface water) and Gwydir Alluvium, both withdrawn on 2 April 2024; Namoi (surface water), withdrawn on 25 May 2023; and Namoi Alluvium, withdrawn on 2 April 2024 (MDBA, 2026). The state's other sixteen plans were accredited between 24 September 2022 and 16 June 2026. Every Queensland plan was operational by 2019, as were South Australia's; Victoria's and the ACT's were operational by 2020 (MDBA, 2026).

This is the hardest, most checkable statement of where New South Wales sits behind the rest of the Basin, and it is not a matter of interpretation. Two northern valleys — the two where floodplain harvesting has been most contested — are the ones still without accredited plans. We would finish them, publish a dated schedule for doing so, and stop treating the delay as a negotiating position.

The Basin's biggest accounting device is failing

The Sustainable Diversion Limit Adjustment Mechanism allows supply measures — works and rule changes that deliver the same environmental outcome with less water — to offset recovery targets. It was agreed in 2017 at a 605 GL/y supply contribution. The MDBA's Sustainable Diversion Limit Adjustment Mechanism: 2025 Assurance Report assessed every measure as at 7 November 2025 against the legislated deadline of 31 December 2026 and found 6 complete, 13 in progress and likely to be completed, 7 in progress and unlikely, 12 highly unlikely and requiring amendment or withdrawal, and 1 withdrawn (MDBA, 2025). On that basis, "Almost half of the SDLAM measures are unlikely to be completed as notified by 31 December 2026 ... the supply contribution at reconciliation is estimated to be between 250 GL/y and 350 GL/y" — a shortfall of 255 to 355 GL/y against what was agreed (MDBA, 2025).

The MDBA is explicit that this range consists of "estimates only" and does "not constitute a statutory decision or recommendation by the Authority", and we should be equally explicit: it is an estimate, published in advance of a reconciliation determination due in late 2026, not a settled number. But it is the Authority's own estimate, and its Chair, Daryl Quinlivan, writes that the Authority "urges the Basin state governments to deliver SDLAM supply measures to the fullest extent practicable" (MDBA, 2025). The deadline was already extended once, by the Water Amendment (Restoring Our Rivers) Act 2023 (Cth), which gave states more time to notify and deliver measures (MDBA, 2025). A second decade of offsets that do not arrive would tell every community on the river that the accounting was never real.

Menindee: where the accounting and the fish kills meet

The Menindee Lakes Water Savings Project was the New South Wales measure intended to generate water savings at Menindee. The MDBA assessed it as highly unlikely to be completed as notified, recording that "The New South Wales Government has advised it is exploring rescoping options for the Menindee Lakes Water Savings Project. While there has been progress on some works identified in the notified measure, these works in isolation do not contribute to an SDL adjustment. Examples include the Broken Hill town water supply pipeline and removal of the Old Menindee Town Weir. The New South Wales Government has also confirmed several of the notified works and operating rules, including those that contributed significantly to the anticipated water efficiency savings, are not being progressed" (MDBA, 2025). The measure had also included investigating relaxation of lower Darling (Baaka) constraints to allow deliveries of up to 14,000 ML/day at Weir 32 (MDBA, 2025).

That paragraph connects three things that are usually argued separately: the Broken Hill pipeline, the water savings New South Wales booked against the Basin Plan, and the condition of the lower Darling–Baaka. The pipeline was built. The savings, on the Authority's assessment, are not coming. Communities are entitled to be told that plainly rather than discovering it in an assurance annexe.

Constraints: real progress, on a timetable that will not meet the deadline

Getting environmental water where it needs to go depends on relaxing physical and legal constraints on river flows, which in turn depends on agreements with landholders whose land may be inundated. The NSW Minister for Water has gazetted a Declaration Order under the Landholder Negotiation Scheme, initiating Phase 1 flow corridor negotiations on the Murrumbidgee between Darlington Point and Balranald and running to 31 December 2026, with Phase 2 upstream of Darlington Point due to commence in 2027 (MDBA, 2025). The scheme carries a compulsory acquisition power: "If a voluntary agreement cannot be reached, compulsory acquisition of an interest in land may be pursued in rare and exceptional circumstances with approval from the New South Wales Minister for Water. However, no compulsory acquisition of an interest in land will be pursued before 31 December 2026" (MDBA, 2025). New South Wales advises that flows may eventually be supported up to the Murrumbidgee water sharing plan limit of 32,000 ML/day, "but not until after 31 December 2026", and the MDBA assessed the Murrumbidgee River Constraints Measure as highly unlikely to be completed on time (MDBA, 2025).

We support constraints relaxation, and we say without hedging that a compulsory acquisition power over riverfront land is a serious thing that has to be used sparingly, transparently and with compensation that is generous rather than grudging. Landholders in that corridor are being asked to carry a public good on private land. The negotiation should feel like a negotiation.

Floodplain harvesting: nearly finished, and it should never have taken this long

The current licensing scheme exists in its present form because the Legislative Council disallowed the water regulations gazetted on 30 April 2021 and established a Select Committee on Floodplain Harvesting, which held four hearings and tabled its final report on 15 December 2021, making 25 recommendations and 14 findings "about the need to reduce and manage floodplain harvesting at environmentally sustainable levels and the changes that must be implemented before the NSW Government embeds the practice through a licensing framework" (NSW Legislative Council Select Committee on Floodplain Harvesting, 2021). The committee's chair, Cate Faehrmann MLC, said the committee "heard convincing evidence that the amount of licences the Water Minister intends to hand out is likely to exceed legislated limits set under the Murray Darling Basin Plan", and that "growth in private storages has increased, yet there has been no proper assessment of the impacts caused by flood works built to capture rain and floods" (NSW Legislative Council Select Committee on Floodplain Harvesting, 2021). The committee also recorded that non-irrigator stakeholders, "including First Nations representatives and environmental groups — felt they have had very little say in the direction of the NSW Floodplain Harvesting Policy" (NSW Legislative Council Select Committee on Floodplain Harvesting, 2021).

Since then the work has largely been done. The department states that "Floodplain harvesting is the last substantial form of water take to be licensed in NSW", and that it "has completed the process of determining replacement floodplain harvesting access licences in the Border Rivers, Gwydir, Barwon-Darling and Macquarie Floodplains", meaning no new replacement licences will be issued in those floodplains, while work continues to implement the licensing and measurement framework in the Namoi Valley (NSW DCCEEW, 2026a). The Water Management (General) Regulation 2018 was amended with effect from 8 December 2023 to "strengthen environmental protections and take a more conservative approach to future licensing of floodplain harvesting in unregulated river water sources" (NSW DCCEEW, 2026a).

We would finish the Namoi, and we would fix the reporting cadence. Progress is published in quarterly Floodplain Harvesting Action Plan reports, but the most recent listed covers July to September 2025 and was published in January 2026 (NSW DCCEEW, 2026a). A quarter's lag on a quarterly report is not near-real-time transparency, and it is not what a community downstream of a large private storage needs during a flow event.

The pattern underneath all of this is deadline drift

Take the dates in this section together. Non-urban metering compliance dates were extended and telemetry made optional for smaller works in the 2023 review (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026). Two Namoi water resource plans and two Gwydir plans have been withdrawn and are still in drafting, in 2023 and 2024 respectively, while every other jurisdiction finished by 2020 (MDBA, 2026). The supply measure deadline was moved to 31 December 2026 by Commonwealth legislation, and almost half the measures are still assessed as unlikely to make it (MDBA, 2025). The Murrumbidgee constraints negotiation runs to the end of 2026 with the second phase starting in 2027 (MDBA, 2025). NRAR's regulatory effectiveness uplift is forecast to finish by 30 June 2027, and the technology roadmap that underpins enforcement runs to 2029 (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026).

No single extension is scandalous. Water reform is genuinely hard, negotiated across borders, and rushing a licensing framework is how New South Wales ended up with a disallowed regulation in 2021. But a decade of individually reasonable extensions produces a system in which the compliance date is always somewhere in the future, and in which the rational response for anyone who would rather not be measured is simply to wait. We would put the remaining dates in one published schedule, with the responsible agency named against each, and treat a missed date as something that has to be explained rather than quietly reset.

A register worth the name

The public, near-real-time water register promised at the top of this section is not a website. It is the visible end of a chain that has to work underneath it: meters that read accurately, systems that were designed to hold regulatory-grade evidence rather than account balances, and a publishing cadence fast enough to matter during an event. On the Auditor-General's evidence, New South Wales currently has weaknesses at every link — data gaps that have made it hard to contact water users, identify breaches and meet evidence standards for criminal charges (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026) — and a floodplain harvesting reporting cycle in which a quarter ending in September was reported in January (NSW DCCEEW, 2026a).

We would rather the state built the plumbing and published modest, accurate data than launched a portal over a source of truth nobody can stand behind. The order matters: measurement, then systems, then publication, then enforcement that can survive a contested hearing.

Proof that measurement changes outcomes: Restoring the Darling–Baaka

There is a working counter-example inside the state's own portfolio. Following the Office of the NSW Chief Scientist and Engineer's independent review into the 2023 mass fish deaths in the Darling–Baaka at Menindee, the department initiated the Restoring the Darling–Baaka program: 26 actions addressing the review's recommendations, publicly reported every six months across a four-year program (NSW DCCEEW, 2026c). On the department's own reporting, action status moved from 10 complete, 13 in progress and 3 under revised timeframes in March 2025, to 14 / 10 / 2 in August 2025, to 16 complete, 9 in progress and 1 under a revised timeframe in February 2026 (NSW DCCEEW, 2026c).

The outcomes are measurable. More than 15,800 fish used the new temporary fishway at Lake Wetherell during its second season, which began on 26 September and ran to April 2026, against roughly 7,000 fish movements in the first season from January to April 2025. Water quality datasets published on the NSW SEED portal rose from 10 in August 2025 to 15 in February 2026, and enhanced monitoring has been used to time water releases to avoid conditions associated with fish deaths on at least 10 occasions over 24 months (NSW DCCEEW, 2026c). These are the department's self-assessed statuses rather than an independent audit, and should be read as such — but they are also the clearest available demonstration that monitoring, published data and operational discretion together change what happens in the river. That is the case this platform makes, tested in the place where the failure was worst.

In the 2019 drought, around ten regional New South Wales cities or towns came close to "zero" water, with others holding six to twelve months of supply and water quality declared unsafe in some towns (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2020). Some smaller communities still experience periodic boil-water alerts, and many council-run water utilities carry ageing treatment works they cannot afford to replace alone.

Safe, secure town water is the most basic test of whether the state takes its regions seriously. We support a sustained co-funding program for regional water security — treatment upgrades, storage, leak reduction and emergency interconnections — prioritised by risk rather than by marginal-seat maps, alongside technical support so small utilities are not left to engineer their way out of drought by themselves.

The 2019 near-misses were a planning failure, and were named as one

The Auditor-General's 2020 performance audit Support for regional town water infrastructure, report 341, released on 24 September 2020, concluded that "The Department of Planning, Industry and Environment has not effectively supported or overseen town water infrastructure planning in regional NSW since at least 2014" (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2020). Regional New South Wales is served by 92 local water utilities covering around 1.85 million people, and at the time of that audit only eight of the 92 — less than ten per cent — had an Integrated Water Cycle Management strategy approved by the department (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2020).

That is the structural fact behind every boil-water notice: the state's town water system is delivered by dozens of small councils, several of which employ a handful of technical staff, and the department that is meant to hold the map had not been holding it.

A billion-dollar program with $408 million spent before applications opened

The same audit examined the Safe and Secure Water Program. On its launch, the $1 billion program "already included a $408 million NSW Government commitment for the Broken Hill Water Supply Project (i.e. the Murray to Broken Hill pipeline). Effectively, the SSWPv1 was designed as a $592 million funding pool for eligible applicants", and while a summary of the final business case was released, the audit records that "we have not seen evidence for the merit of the relative priority of this project in the context of the SSWPv1 eligibility and assessment criteria or process" (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2020). It further found that "About a third of funded SSWP projects were recommended via various alternative processes that were not transparent", and that the redesigned second version of the program had identified and rated over 1,000 town water risks across regional New South Wales but had funded no projects as at August 2020 (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2020).

This is the "prioritised by risk rather than by marginal-seat maps" commitment above, with an auditor's evidence under it. We are not arguing that the Broken Hill pipeline should not have been built; a city running out of water needs water. We are arguing that a $408 million decision made before the assessment criteria were published, inside a program badged as competitive, is the mechanism by which towns with the worst risk ratings lose to towns with the best advocates. Publish the risk register, publish the ranking, and fund down the list.

Pipelines are one answer, not the answer

The state's instinct in a town water crisis has been to build a pipe. Sometimes that is right: Broken Hill needed supply, and it got it. But the Murray to Broken Hill pipeline also carried $408 million of a $1 billion program before applications opened (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2020), and the water savings measure it sat inside is now assessed by the Murray–Darling Basin Authority as highly unlikely to be completed, with New South Wales confirming that the components generating most of the anticipated savings are not proceeding (MDBA, 2025). One decision, two consequences: less contestable funding for every other town, and an offset booked against the Basin Plan that is not arriving.

We support pipelines where they win on a published business case. The discipline the Productivity Commission asks for — projects "assessed as economically viable and ecologically sustainable, with decisions informed by comprehensive cost benefit analyses and independent scrutiny", with business cases published as a matter of course for major projects (Productivity Commission, 2024) — is not a hurdle for regional infrastructure. It is the only way a town without a champion in Cabinet gets a fair hearing against a town with one.

Structural weakness in small utilities has a program — extend it, do not restart it

The department's Town Water Risk Reduction Program "started in 2020 in response to growing concerns about the resilience, safety, and sustainability of regional water services across New South Wales ... designed to address systemic risks in town water supply, including ageing infrastructure, workforce shortages, and ineffective regulatory and governance settings in the LWU sector" (NSW DCCEEW, 2026d). Phase 1 ran from December 2020 to July 2022, Phase 2 from December 2022 to July 2025, and Phase 3 runs from 2025 to 2028 investing $15 million, including $2 million in Advanced Operational Support "to enable 20 Local Water Utilities to carry out critical infrastructure upgrades", along with workforce development and reforms responding to the NSW Productivity and Equality Commission's review of funding models for local water utilities (NSW DCCEEW, 2026d).

Eight years and three phases in, the honest question is one of scale rather than existence. Twenty utilities out of 92 receiving operational support, from $2 million, is a pilot. We support extending this program rather than announcing a replacement for it, and we would judge it by whether the number of utilities with approved strategies, qualified operators and funded renewal programs actually rises.

Wilcannia: what unfinished town water looks like in 2026

Wilcannia is the clearest current case. The department reports that "Work on developing a replacement weir in Wilcannia has been paused after the Australian Government confirmed it is unable to commit further funding to the project at this time", noting that the town's original weir, built in 1942, "is no longer operational" (NSW DCCEEW, 2026e). The revised fixed-crest design, with a vertical-slot fishway, would provide "an additional 400 ML of water security for the town" and "boost water storage by 20 per cent" (NSW DCCEEW, 2026e).

Other work is proceeding. The NSW Government has committed $70 million to water security projects in Wilcannia; a new water treatment plant designed to treat 1.2 ML/day is replacing infrastructure built in the 1970s, one of three plants across Central Darling Shire funded by $21.5 million — $10 million from the Australian Government's National Water Grid Fund and $11.5 million from New South Wales — for Wilcannia, White Cliffs and Ivanhoe; and the department internally sourced $2 million for an additional emergency groundwater bore, with test drilling at the Wilcannia Golf Course in mid to late 2026 conducted under Barkandji Ranger cultural heritage supervision (NSW DCCEEW, 2026e). The department's own assessment of the existing plants is that they are at the end of their design life, "which puts the delivery of safe, clean drinking water at risk and means that residents sometimes have to rely on bottles or boiled water" (NSW DCCEEW, 2026e).

Two things follow. The first is that intergovernmental funding gaps are not an abstraction — they are a weir that does not get built in a town that has been waiting since 1942 for reliable supply. The second is that the Barkandji Ranger involvement in the bore program is the right model and should be the default, not a feature of one project.

Walgett: water quality as a health question

Walgett sits at the junction of this platform's two water arguments — river health and town supply — because when the Barwon and Namoi fail, the town switches to Great Artesian Basin bore water. Research conducted by UNSW Sydney and The George Institute for Global Health with the Dharriwaa Elders Group and the Walgett Aboriginal Medical Service, under the Yuwaya Ngarra-li partnership, reports that "The sodium levels in the groundwater are typically 290 to 300 mg/litre", against the 20 mg/litre level referenced by the National Health and Medical Research Council for people with chronic conditions such as hypertension, heart disease or kidney problems (UNSW Sydney, 2023). A 2022 community survey by the same partnership measured water insecurity in Walgett and the nearby villages of Namoi and Gingie exceeding levels recorded in Dhaka, Guatemala and Beirut, with some households spending up to $50 a week on bottled water, and Aboriginal community-controlled organisations have called for an independent, multi-agency taskforce on the town's water quality and security (UNSW Sydney, 2023).

The qualifications matter and we state them. This is university and community-controlled-organisation research rather than a regulator's finding; the figures date from 2022–23; the NSW Government and Walgett Shire Council have contested characterisations of the supply as unsafe; and the 20 mg/L figure is dietary guidance for people on sodium-restricted diets, not a drinking-water safety standard. None of that disposes of the underlying point. A town where residents buy bottled water because they do not trust the tap has a water problem, whether or not the supply meets a compliance threshold, and the answer is to publish the data by town and let people see it for themselves.

Drought is not an interruption to the Australian climate; it is part of it. The time to decide how a town or a valley gets through the next one is before it arrives. We would back drought resilience plans agreed in advance for each region — settled trigger points and responses instead of crisis-time improvisation — plus continued investment in on-farm water efficiency, better groundwater mapping so aquifers are understood before they are leaned on, and evidence-led evaluation of all supply options, including recycled water, ahead of panic-built infrastructure at premium prices.

Regional water strategies: progress made, job to finish

The state's regional water strategies cover 13 regions over a 20 to 40 year horizon, and twelve are now adopted: Greater Hunter in November 2018; Border Rivers, Gwydir, North Coast and South Coast in November 2022; Western in December 2022; Far North Coast and Namoi in June 2023; Macquarie–Castlereagh in October 2023; Lachlan in December 2024; and Murrumbidgee and NSW Murray in December 2025. A thirteenth, Fish River–Wywandy, covering Lithgow, the Upper Macquarie and the Upper Blue Mountains, has recently commenced, with information to be published in 2026 (NSW DCCEEW, 2026b). The Western strategy alone covers Broken Hill, Wilcannia and Cobar and about one-third of the state's land mass (NSW DCCEEW, 2026b).

We say plainly that this is progress: in 2020 the Auditor-General found only one of the then twelve strategies complete (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2020). The task now is to finish the last one and, more importantly, to convert strategies into funded works with dates against them. A strategy is a plan for spending money; it is not the money.

Groundwater: understood before it is leaned on

When surface water fails, towns and irrigators lean on aquifers, and the state's knowledge of what is down there becomes the binding constraint. The pattern is visible in both towns discussed above: Walgett switches to Great Artesian Basin bore water when the rivers stop, with the sodium concentrations reported by the Yuwaya Ngarra-li research partnership and the qualifications set out in section 2 (UNSW Sydney, 2023); and at Wilcannia the department internally sourced $2 million for an additional emergency groundwater bore, with test drilling planned for mid to late 2026 (NSW DCCEEW, 2026e). Groundwater is not a reserve that appears in an emergency. It is a shared resource with its own licences — the approximately 40,000 water access licences in rural and regional New South Wales include the alluvial systems whose water resource plans are among the four still unfinished (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026; MDBA, 2026).

We support better groundwater mapping and monitoring before the next drought forces the question, and we would apply the same measurement standard to groundwater take as to surface water. An aquifer that is metered only when it is already stressed will be managed by argument rather than by evidence, and the recharge rates that determine whether a town's fallback supply is real are not something to be estimated in the middle of a shortage.

What crisis-time improvisation actually looks like in statute

New South Wales already has a standing emergency water law. "In late 2019, New South Wales' Water Supply (Critical Needs) Act 2019 came into effect. Its stated aim is to facilitate emergency water supplies in certain towns and localities, and to declare certain water infrastructure developments as critical State significant infrastructure" (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2020). The state can also appoint an administrator to a council water utility following a public inquiry under section 66 of the Local Government Act 1993, with the concurrence of the Minister for Local Government (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2020).

A statute passed in the depths of a drought to switch off ordinary planning scrutiny is the definition of deciding late. We would rather the trigger points, the supply options, the approvals pathway and the cost sharing were settled for each region in advance — in the regional water strategies that already exist — so that emergency powers are the exception they were meant to be rather than the mechanism by which the most expensive infrastructure gets built fastest.

Test the supply options before the emergency, not during it

The discipline we ask for here is the same one the Productivity Commission asks of water infrastructure generally: projects "assessed as economically viable and ecologically sustainable, with decisions informed by comprehensive cost benefit analyses and independent scrutiny", and, for major projects, "publication of business cases as a matter of course" (Productivity Commission, 2024). Recycled water, managed aquifer recharge, interconnection, demand management and desalination should each be on the table with a published cost per megalitre and a published reliability estimate, assessed before a town is at six months of supply. The 2020 audit's finding that a third of funded projects came through processes that were not transparent is what happens when the assessment is done under pressure (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2020).

Water security is only half the story. Regional New South Wales keeps its people when the essentials of life stay local — and too many are quietly leaving town.

• Health. People living in regional and rural local health districts live on average 2.2 years less than people in metropolitan districts — 81.4 years against 83.6 — on NSW Health's own submission to the Legislative Council inquiry into rural, regional and remote health (Parliament of New South Wales, 2022). That inquiry, Portfolio Committee No. 2's Report 57 of May 2022, drew on 720 submissions and made 44 recommendations, finding "That residents in rural, regional and remote New South Wales have inferior access to health and hospital services, especially for those living in remote towns and locations and Indigenous communities, which has led to instances of patients receiving substandard levels of care" (Parliament of New South Wales, 2022).

  Three years on, the Legislative Assembly's Select Committee on Remote, Rural and Regional Health, chaired by Dr Joe McGirr, recorded that as at June 2024 NSW Health reported 25 of the 44 recommendations completed, but that "the progress reported by NSW Health continues to be at odds with what communities and stakeholders are experiencing on the ground", citing critical staffing shortages, poor workplace culture and "an over-reliance on locum doctors", and recommending an independent NSW Remote, Rural and Regional Health Commissioner (Parliament of New South Wales, 2025). The same report credits real gains — the Rural Health Workforce Incentive Scheme, improvements to the Isolated Patients Travel and Accommodation Assistance Scheme, and expansion of the Rural Generalist Single Employer Pathway (Parliament of New South Wales, 2025). We support building on what is working and would test any further reform against whether the gap in life expectancy closes, because that is the number that cannot be spun.

• Schools. Persistent teacher vacancies concentrate in the regions. Incentives and staff housing should follow the gaps.

• Banking and services. Bank branches keep closing across country New South Wales, as national inquiries have documented. Where the market walks away, government should back practical alternatives — community banking partnerships, while being honest that Bank@Post is not a branch — it handles deposits, withdrawals and balance enquiries, not account opening, lending, business banking or advice — and keep face-to-face government services in town.

• Connectivity. Mobile blackspots on regional roads are a safety issue, not a convenience issue. We support continued co-investment in coverage and resilient connectivity for towns that lose everything when one tower goes down in a fire or flood.

• Housing. Regional rents and prices surged after the pandemic, and the shortage of homes for nurses, teachers, police and tradespeople is now itself a barrier to fixing every other service gap. We support key-worker housing in regional centres, help for councils to bring serviced land to market — water and sewer being the real constraint in many towns — and planning capacity so small shires are not the bottleneck.

• The workforce that runs the water. The department's own diagnosis of the local water utility sector names workforce shortages alongside ageing infrastructure as a systemic risk (NSW DCCEEW, 2026d). A shire that cannot house a qualified treatment plant operator cannot run a treatment plant, which makes the housing bullet above a water policy as much as a housing one.

1. Treat a water licence as the property right it is, and let a well-policed market do the allocating

Defend the entitlement framework as the thing that makes everything in section 1 possible, and test every trading rule against one question: does it move water to where it is worth most, without pushing costs onto people who were never party to the deal? The National Water Initiative already requires water access entitlements to be "separate from land, exclusive, mortgageable, tradeable and provide a perpetual right to a share of a system's consumptive pool", and the Productivity Commission's advice to governments is to recommit to entitlement settings that "have been fundamental to the integrity of water management and a necessary prerequisite for water trading and markets" (Productivity Commission, 2024). Markets built on that foundation "can play an important role in allocating water efficiently", and the Commission's leading-practice advice is that "the boundaries of water markets should be shaped by hydrology; trade between locations or sectors should not be limited by artificial administrative impediments", with market operations that "optimise transaction costs, including both monetary (for example, trade approval fees) and non-monetary (for example, from trade approval processing times and regulation of trade related services)" (Productivity Commission, 2024). New South Wales has homework on both halves of that bargain. On measurement — the precondition for a market anyone trusts — the 2023 figures the Commission publishes for the Murray–Darling Basin part of this state, sourced from the Inspector-General of Water Compliance because New South Wales does not comprehensively report AS4747 metering itself, record 79.0 per cent of water take metered, but only 23.1 per cent metered to the AS4747 standard and 21.0 per cent not metered at all; nationally, most jurisdictions are not on track to meet their commitment to have all water entitlements metered by July 2025, which "undermines the ability of states to conduct proper measurement of watering limits and increases the risk of unreported water use and overextraction", and governments' lack of practical implementation planning for the meter rollout "is eroding trust by water users in water regulators and in other metered users" (Productivity Commission, 2024). On information, the same report finds that registers would serve market participants better if they carried "current entitlement and allocation information, real time (or recent) trade data, and that registers are freely accessible by the public, and ideally, easy to search" — which is the public water register promised in section 1, argued here on efficiency grounds rather than transparency grounds alone. And on plumbing, the Commission's specific advice to New South Wales for the next assessment period is to complete the planned rollouts of floodplain harvesting licences and AS4747 metering, and to continue efforts towards a cross-border trade agreement with the Australian Capital Territory — a discussion it notes has been running for over a decade (Productivity Commission, 2024). One qualification belongs in the same breath. Trade moves water, and water leaving a district takes economic activity with it, so this sits in real tension with the commitment in section 4 to keep people and services in country towns. We would not resolve that by blocking trade. We would resolve it the way the Commission frames it — arrangements that "protect against negative third-party impacts of water trades on other water users and the environment", published data so those effects are visible early, and adjustment support argued for openly on its merits instead of smuggled in as a trading restriction.

2. Recover water the cheapest way per megalitre, and publish the number either way

Require every program that recovers water for the environment or subsidises water efficiency — Commonwealth or state — to publish an estimated cost per megalitre of water actually recovered, on a consistent method, and to be ranked against the alternatives before the money is committed. This is not a new standard invented for a press release: governments already agreed under the National Water Initiative to "selection of measures primarily on the basis of cost-effectiveness, and with a view to managing socio-economic impacts" (Productivity Commission, 2024). The gap between instruments is not a rounding error. The Productivity Commission put the average cost of water recovery through voluntary purchase at $2,808 per megalitre, against $8,126 per megalitre through gap-bridging irrigation infrastructure — "almost three times more expensive per ML" — in 2022 dollars, and before the cost of any transitional assistance is counted (Productivity Commission, 2023). Its reasoning is a property rights one: "By purchasing from willing sellers at market prices, direct water purchases protect property rights and encourage irrigators to adjust to a future with less water" (Productivity Commission, 2023). The Commission is equally direct about the alternative, warning that where funded infrastructure projects fail the tests of public benefit and benefit-cost analysis, such subsidies "may distort investment decisions and impose costs on the broader community by diverting water resources to less productive uses and reduce incentives to improve efficiency", and that "providing subsidies for infrastructure projects can create a risk that other, more cost-effective means to enable regional economic growth or to improve water security are not considered" (Productivity Commission, 2024). We should say plainly that this cuts against the continued investment in on-farm water efficiency promised in section 3. We keep that commitment — on the condition that it has to beat the market price of the same megalitre, with the comparison published, and that the regional water security co-funding in section 2 meets the same discipline the Commission asks of water infrastructure investment: projects "assessed as economically viable and ecologically sustainable, with decisions informed by comprehensive cost benefit analyses and independent scrutiny", and, for major projects, "publication of business cases as a matter of course" (Productivity Commission, 2024). Two cautions, because cost per megalitre is not the only number that matters. The Commission does not recommend "a sole reliance on large-scale, rapid open-tender water purchasing": a large program run into a tight market over a short timeframe "risks sharply raising prices and causing significant angst and adjustment pressure for Basin communities", and rapid, uncoordinated purchasing can affect the viability of irrigation networks. What it recommends instead is "a holistic program of gradual water recovery that considers all options on their merits, but maintains a primary focus on cost-effectiveness", coordinated with network rationalisation and accompanied by adjustment assistance where that is warranted (Productivity Commission, 2023). And the property right cuts both ways: taking water by administrative reduction rather than buying it "can be an economically inefficient way to return water to the environment, as it may undermine confidence in the property right a water entitlement provides" (Productivity Commission, 2023). Buying beats confiscating, and a published price beats an announced intention.

3. Say honestly what the supply measure shortfall means, and stop booking savings that are not coming

Ask the New South Wales Government to state, before the reconciliation determination due in late 2026, which of its notified supply measures it will deliver, which it will amend and which it will withdraw — and to publish the volume consequence of each. The Authority's estimate is that the supply contribution at reconciliation will land between 250 GL/y and 350 GL/y against the 605 GL/y agreed in 2017, an estimate it stresses is not a statutory decision (MDBA, 2025). Where a measure is not proceeding — as New South Wales has confirmed for the components of the Menindee Lakes Water Savings Project that generated most of the anticipated savings (MDBA, 2025) — the shortfall should be acknowledged in the state's own reporting rather than left to an assurance annexe. On the alternative, the Commonwealth's voluntary purchasing under the Restoring Our Rivers reforms has moved substantial volumes: as at 15 June 2026, 216.8 GL/y had been contracted through the second expression-of-interest round and 10.8 GL/y through the first, with 51.3 GL/y accepted and being finalised under the Selected Catchment Open Tender as at 17 September 2025, and in November 2025 the Minister approved a further 130 GL, taking the total limit for the Voluntary Water Purchase Program in the southern Basin to 300 GL (Commonwealth DCCEEW, 2026). These are figures for the southern connected Basin as a whole, not New South Wales alone, and the caution in direction 2 against rapid, uncoordinated purchasing applies with full force. The point is narrower: a state that cannot deliver an offset should not be arguing against the instrument that works while the offset quietly fails.

4. Commission the evaluation that has never been done, and impact-assess the big water instruments

Ask for an independent evaluation of the water reform agenda against the objects of the Water Management Act 2000 and the Water Reform Action Plan — the evaluation the Auditor-General found has not been carried out — and require regulatory impact assessment for major water instruments in future, given that neither non-urban metering nor floodplain harvesting licensing was subject to one (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026). We support the four recommendations of report 427 being implemented in full and reported against publicly, on dates, rather than absorbed into a work program.

5. Fund the measurement systems, and do not let the roadmap depend on an unapproved loan

Treat the Water Administration Ministerial Corporation technology roadmap — $43.96 million over three years to 2029 after IPART's October 2025 determination — as core regulatory infrastructure rather than a discretionary IT project, and require the agencies to document what happens if the debt funding WaterNSW has committed to is not available, a risk the Auditor-General found none of their risk documentation adequately accounts for (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026). We would also support the review of the Corporation's governance that IPART recommended the Minister for Water initiate, and the far more basic recommendation that a body charging rural water users should have a website and engage with the people paying (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026).

6. Make the regulator's performance reporting public, comparable and audited

NRAR's own documents concede it "cannot currently demonstrate its regulatory effectiveness with confidence", with an uplift project forecast to finish by 30 June 2027 (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026). We would ask that the outcomes framework endorsed in November 2025 be published with its metrics, that results be reported on a fixed cycle in a form comparable year to year, and that the fee share of NRAR's funding — around 15 per cent between 2019 and 2025 — be disclosed alongside them, so the question of capture is answered by evidence rather than assertion (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026). A regulator with 217 staff and $44.82 million a year, policing approximately 40,000 licences over entitlements worth up to $41 billion, should not have to argue about whether it is working (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2026).

7. Finish the four outstanding water resource plans, on a published schedule

Gwydir, Gwydir Alluvium, Namoi and Namoi Alluvium remain with New South Wales for final drafting; every other Basin jurisdiction completed accreditation by 2020 (MDBA, 2026). We support finishing them and publishing a dated schedule for submission and assessment, with the modelling released at the same time. Whatever the merits of the state's position in past disputes, being the only jurisdiction still drafting is a weak place from which to argue for anything.

8. Fund town water down a published risk register

Publish the town water risk ratings the department has already developed — over 1,000 risks were identified and rated across regional New South Wales in the redesign of the Safe and Secure Water Program (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2020) — and fund projects in risk order, with any departure from that order explained in writing. The same audit's findings about $408 million pre-committed before applications opened, and about a third of funded projects arriving through processes that were not transparent, are the reason this needs to be a rule rather than a practice (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2020). We would pair it with an expansion of the Town Water Risk Reduction Program's operational support beyond the 20 utilities currently in scope (NSW DCCEEW, 2026d).

9. Settle drought triggers region by region, before the next drought

Use the twelve adopted regional water strategies as the vehicle for pre-agreed drought trigger points, supply responses, approval pathways and cost sharing, and finish the thirteenth (NSW DCCEEW, 2026b). The alternative is the 2019 model: around ten towns near zero water, a department that had not effectively overseen planning since at least 2014, and emergency legislation to clear the way for infrastructure decided under duress (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2020). Deciding in advance is cheaper, and it is fairer to the towns without a lobbyist.

10. Publish drinking water quality and supply status town by town

The state has already shown this can be done: water quality datasets on the SEED portal for the Darling–Baaka rose from 10 to 15 between August 2025 and February 2026, and monitoring has been used to time releases away from fish-death conditions on at least 10 occasions in two years (NSW DCCEEW, 2026c). We support the same treatment for town water — current quality results, days of supply, and treatment plant status published for every regional utility, in a form a resident can read. Where a community is buying bottled water because it does not trust the tap, as researchers report in Walgett (UNSW Sydney, 2023), published data is the cheapest way to either restore confidence or prove the concern justified.

11. Give First Nations a real seat at the table on floodplain harvesting and river operations

The Upper House committee that forced the current licensing framework back to first principles recorded that non-irrigator stakeholders, "including First Nations representatives and environmental groups — felt they have had very little say in the direction of the NSW Floodplain Harvesting Policy" (NSW Legislative Council Select Committee on Floodplain Harvesting, 2021). Five years on, with licensing complete in four northern valleys and continuing in the Namoi (NSW DCCEEW, 2026a), the remaining decisions — measurement, compliance, and the operating rules that determine when water reaches the lower Darling–Baaka — are exactly the ones on which that voice matters most. The Barkandji Ranger cultural heritage supervision of test drilling at Wilcannia shows the working model already exists in the department's own projects (NSW DCCEEW, 2026e). This is a direction we want debated, including with the communities concerned, rather than a settled position we ask anyone to accept.

A state that is honest about its rivers, keeps its towns' water safe, and keeps the essentials of life in country communities will find the regions do the rest themselves. That is the future the Australian Democrats will argue for.

New South Wales sources

Audit Office of New South Wales. (2020). Support for regional town water infrastructure. Performance audit, Parliamentary reference report number 341, 24 September 2020. Sydney: Audit Office of New South Wales. Available at: Support for regional town water infrastructure

Audit Office of New South Wales. (2026). Water management and regulation in NSW. Performance audit, Parliamentary reference report number 427, 15 June 2026. Sydney: Audit Office of New South Wales. Quoting the Independent Commission Against Corruption (November 2020), the NSW Ombudsman (August 2018) and IPART's October 2025 determination. Available at: Water management and regulation in NSW

NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (NSW DCCEEW). (2026a). Licensing floodplain harvesting and Floodplain Harvesting Action Plan quarterly progress reporting. Sydney: NSW Government. Available at: Floodplain harvesting

NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (NSW DCCEEW). (2026b). Regional water strategies program. Sydney: NSW Government. Available at: Regional water strategies

NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (NSW DCCEEW). (2026c). Restoring the Darling–Baaka program — progress reporting against the Office of the NSW Chief Scientist and Engineer's independent review into the 2023 mass fish deaths at Menindee. Sydney: NSW Government. Available at: Restoring the Darling-Baaka

NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (NSW DCCEEW). (2026d). Town Water Risk Reduction Program. Sydney: NSW Government. Available at: Town Water Risk Reduction Program

NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (NSW DCCEEW). (2026e). Wilcannia water security and quality. Page updated 16 July 2026. Sydney: NSW Government. Available at: Wilcannia water security and quality

NSW Legislative Council Select Committee on Floodplain Harvesting. (2021). Upper House Inquiry's Final Report Critical of Government's Attempts to License Floodplain Harvesting in New South Wales. Media release on the tabling of the committee's final report, 15 December 2021. Sydney: Parliament of New South Wales. Available at: Legislative Council committees

Parliament of New South Wales. (2022). Health outcomes and access to health and hospital services in rural, regional and remote New South Wales. Legislative Council Portfolio Committee No. 2 – Health, Report 57, May 2022. Sydney: Parliament of New South Wales. Available at: Report 57 — rural, regional and remote health

Parliament of New South Wales. (2025). Final report: The implementation of recommendations relating to cross-jurisdictional health reform and government consultation with remote, rural and regional communities. Legislative Assembly Select Committee on Remote, Rural and Regional Health, Report 3/58, May 2025. Sydney: Parliament of New South Wales. Available at: Report 3/58 — remote, rural and regional health

Commonwealth and Murray–Darling Basin sources

Australian Government Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (Commonwealth DCCEEW). (2026). Voluntary Water Purchase Program for the 450 GL (Restoring our Rivers) and Selected Catchment Open Tender. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Available at: Water purchasing — Restoring our Rivers

Murray–Darling Basin Authority (MDBA). (2025). Sustainable Diversion Limit Adjustment Mechanism: 2025 Assurance Report. Publication no. 30/25, December 2025. Canberra: MDBA. Available at: SDL adjustment mechanism

Murray–Darling Basin Authority (MDBA). (2026). List of state water resource plans. Last updated 15 June 2026. Canberra: MDBA. Available at: Water resource plans

Productivity Commission. (2023). Murray–Darling Basin Plan: Implementation review 2023. Inquiry report no. 103, 19 December 2023. Canberra: Productivity Commission. https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries-and-research/basin-plan-2023/report/

Productivity Commission. (2024). National Water Reform 2024. Inquiry report no. 105, 28 May 2024. Canberra: Productivity Commission. https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries-and-research/water-reform-2024/report/

Research and community-controlled sources

UNSW Sydney. (2023). Aboriginal organisations demand action on Walgett drinking water health threat. Yuwaya Ngarra-li briefing paper and Food and Water for Life survey, with The George Institute for Global Health, the Dharriwaa Elders Group and the Walgett Aboriginal Medical Service. Sydney: UNSW Sydney. Available at: Walgett drinking water research