Assessment of progress against Water Management Partnership Agreement reform actions
This report – Volume 2 of the COAG Reform Council’s report – is the Commission’s second report to the COAG Reform Council. It fulfils the Commission’s delegated responsibility to independently assess and report on Murray-Darling Basin State Governments’ performance in delivering the water reform actions for the 2010 reporting period. They have committed to these through the Commonwealth-State Water Management Partnership Agreements.
In this report the Commission assessed whether progress was made during the reporting period against the actions committed to in Schedule 1 of each agreement. This included assessing whether actions due during the 2010 reporting period were undertaken on time and were consistent with the requirements for each agreement. The Commission also assessed risks to the timely delivery and likely effectiveness of reform actions and milestones due in future years.
The assessed reform actions fall into three categories: water planning and management, water trading and markets, and state-specific reform commitments.
The Commission found that most water planning actions were completed, the development of new water plans is well advanced, most states met the ongoing trade service standards for water markets, and trading and trade processing systems had improved.
Water planning and management
Most of the 2010 water planning and management actions relate to risk assessment and management. The Commission found that the majority of due actions had been completed, but some were late or did not include all of the expected content.
Water trading and markets
The Commission continued to monitor ongoing water market trade service standards (a 2009 commitment), because of their crucial role in ensuring an efficient water market. Only Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory had established monitoring and reporting systems that were able to provide data sought on processing times for water trades.
For the water trading and markets actions, most states met the ongoing trade service standards most of the time and showed improvement. The Commission found improvements in processing systems and wider use of ‘stop the clock’ policies.
State-specific reform commitments
South Australia is the only state that has state-specific reform commitments, with actions related to the unbundling of water entitlements. South Australia has met those commitments and the process has some years still to run.
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