Australian Water Management Review Vol 1 2010 | Page 11

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One resource

The report also foreshadows the end of
the un-metered private bore. Although
knowledge of Australian groundwater
resources is patchy and often poor, there
are clear signs in some areas – mainly from
sinking water tables – that they are being
emptied faster than nature can replenish
them. The drying climate will make this
worse. In view of this, the NWC argues that
all groundwater be regarded as connected
to surface water, unless there is good
scientific evidence to the contrary – in
effect, every litre taken from a bore should
be regarded as coming from a connected
river or major surface water source.
All states and territories have now passed
laws that regard surface and groundwater
as a single resource, other than Western
Australia, which has recognised
connectivity through its planning
processes. In order to better map our
underground water, its surface connection
and how quickly we are using it, all bores
should be from now on be licensed and
metered, with priority for those systems
known to be heavily-exploited, the NWC
says. It urges a nationwide effort to
quantify Australia’s groundwater resources
more accurately.

Measuring water

With the Bureau of Meteorology now
in charge, Australia is for the first time
creating a central set of accounts for
water. Following the advice that, if you
can’t measure it you can’t manage it, there
has been good progress in developing
national standards for water accounting,
the NWC says. It urges individual
jurisdictions to adopt these quickly, along
with plans for metering and measuring all
their water resources.
In what could prove a ‘watershed’ for
Australian attitudes to water (as a precious
substance rather than a free gift) the
Commission makes the far-reaching
recommendation “that governments
commit to a shared ultimate national goal
of universal licensing and metering of
all surface and groundwater extractions,
including for stock and domestic
purposes.” To give it teeth, it urges a
national approach to compliance and
enforcement, to catch the water cheats.

A thirsty landscape

Without water even the drought-hardy
Australian landscape dies – and many

of its iconic places are now at great
risk, the report notes: “Widespread and
prolonged drought has resulted in critical
environmental degradation in the MurrayDarling Basin. High profile cases of
ecological decline, like the Lower lakes
and Coorong...have been linked to a
combination of drought and unsustainable
extraction.” While the ideal of giving
a share of water to the environment is
honoured in most water plans its practical
implementation often lags far behind.
Indeed, many plans still lack tools for
making good decisions about where, when
and how much to water.
The NWC wants all water jurisdictions to
state clearly the environmental outcomes
they aim to achieve, and how their
water use will achieve them. In times
of extreme scarcity, any decision to take
water away from the environment must
be publicly explained and justified. The
Commission strongly supports buybacks,
large and small, to augment environmental
water and is critical of State barriers to
water trade that undermine this. It wants
environmental water to be registered and
reported in a consistent national fashion,
and a national scientific approach to list
the ecosystems most in need of watering.

Ending over-use

Overallocation is when the total of all
water extraction entitlements adds up
to more than the sustainable level of
extraction. Overuse is when more water
is actually taken than is sustainable.

Unfortunately, despite these being fairly
straightforw