What is water management?

Water management in Australia is one of the country's most consequential public-policy challenges. Australia is the driest inhabited continent on Earth, with average annual rainfall of about 470 millimetres compared with a global land average of 720 millimetres, and rainfall is highly variable from year to year. Managing water for drinking, agriculture, industry, and the environment requires complex arrangements between the federal, state, and territory governments, irrigators, and Indigenous communities.

The Murray-Darling Basin is the most heavily managed water system in the country. The basin covers about 14 per cent of Australia's land area across New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and the Australian Capital Territory, and produces about 40 per cent of the country's food and fibre by value. The Water Act 2007 and the Murray-Darling Basin Plan agreed in 2012 set caps on water extraction, reserve environmental flows for rivers and wetlands, and create a national water market through which entitlements are bought and sold. The plan remains politically contested, with downstream communities in South Australia regularly in conflict with upstream irrigators in New South Wales and Queensland.

Urban water supply is managed through state water authorities and large dam systems. Sydney is supplied by Warragamba Dam, Melbourne by the Thomson and Cardinia reservoirs, Brisbane by Wivenhoe Dam, Perth substantially by groundwater and desalination, Adelaide partly from the Murray River and partly from the Mount Lofty Ranges, and Canberra by Googong Dam and the Cotter system. Most capital cities now have desalination plants built during the Millennium Drought (1996 to 2010) that operate during extended dry periods.

Indigenous water management is increasingly recognised in policy. The Murray-Darling Basin Plan now includes First Nations water-holding arrangements, and the National Water Initiative obliges states to consult with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples on water plans. Cultural flows, water released specifically to maintain Aboriginal cultural sites and practices, are now part of several state water plans, and the Aboriginal Water Initiative in Western Australia is one of the leading examples of co-management.