Recently, the Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, announced the highest tribute for public administration to a South Australian water bureaucracy.
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We would question this achievement as water bureaucracies across Australia struggle meeting their commitment of fair play, efficient delivery and compliance.
Water “reform” has been ongoing for the last 30 years and we have seen constant departmental restructuring, empire building, job losses, loss of corporate knowledge, staff relocations and dispersal, splitting of departments, patch protection and rebadging.
In 2003 the Department of Land and Water Conservation was dissolved and there has been constant restructuring of water management around every two years with a revolving door of bureaucrats, ministers and advisors.
For rural regional communities this has been overwhelmingly disruptive as we continue to suffer from “reform fatigue”.
“Reform” in this context is a highly questionable term.
Last week’s damming Ombudsman’s report has highlighted further issues within water management and exposed failings at high levels of bureaucracy and government.
Is this finally the beginning of a process to unearth deeply entrenched, systemic problems which irrigated agricultural communities have known about and have been questioning all along?
With John Howard’s Commonwealth takeover of the Murray Darling Basin and the introduction of the Federal Government’s 2007 Water Act, the promised streamlining of bureaucracy with more efficient, transparent and practical water management has, to the contrary, loaded up our communities with further levels of complex bureaucracy.
Delivering water to the front gate of our farms now involves at least 17 different departments who try and justify their existence and maintain their jobs.
With Australia’s small population we simply cannot afford inappropriate, overlapping and contradictory rules and regulations that usually end up favouring a few or favouring ‘the management’.
Compliance needs to be efficient, relevant, affordable and enforced by an objective department and not by those that can clearly set and mark their own homework.
It is also frustrating and unfair that we are advised to continually accept “least worst outcomes” in order to appease political expectations and the media.
NSW rural regional communities have been desperately trying to navigate a more practical deal from the Murray Darling Basin Plan and unwind the State government’s self-inflicted chaos.
It has placed our communities in a vulnerable position.
One could describe irrigation communities as political “road kill” or “cannon fodder’ as we try to sort out this complex, scrambled mess.