The Productivity Commission has handed the Australian Government its fourth assessment of national water reform. It will be scrutinised, debated and responded to. But the question that decides whether this report matters is not in the report itself: what happens after it lands?
Australia has become very good at assessing water reform. We are far less consistent at acting on what those assessments tell us. That is a feature of the system we have built, not a failure of any one government. We assess, evaluate, audit and report on water management as thoroughly as any field of public policy we have. What we have lost is the connection between finding and consequence: the machinery that turns “this was found” into “so this was done”.
The gap matters because Australia’s water challenges are getting harder, not easier. Climate change is changing the reliability of water. Demand is shifting, cities are growing, agriculture is changing, and communities are asking sharper questions about who gets water, who bears the risk and whose knowledge counts.
Consider the statutory water resource plans under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, the foundation instruments jurisdictions were required to have in place by 2019. When the Productivity Commission reviewed the Basin Plan’s implementation in 2023, half of New South Wales’s twenty plans were still awaiting accreditation.
While there has been substantial progress since, the lesson is that delivery can run years behind a legislated timetable without a consequence sufficient to bring delivery back in line. This is not a criticism of New South Wales; it is an illustration of what the national system permits.
There is a second lesson: completing a plan is not the same as getting the decision right. In 2025 the Federal Court quashed the accreditation of one of those plans, the Fractured Rock groundwater plan, after the Commonwealth conceded that the then minister did not have the plan before her when she accredited it.
It took a challenge by a confederation of twenty Traditional Owner groups to bring that to light, and the plan has gone back for reconsideration. Delivery that runs late, and decisions made without care, cost the same thing: the system’s credibility.
Every jurisdiction has its own examples of good reform caught between policy intent and delivery. That is why this is a system problem, not a story about one government.
When implementation falls behind, the instinct is to ask who is responsible. We think the better question is what the system makes possible. If governments can miss agreed milestones without consequence, delay costs nothing, and what costs nothing happens more often. If communities are asked to accept difficult decisions without being genuinely involved in shaping them, resistance becomes rational too. The problem is systemic, and so is the remedy.
Australia does not need to invent a new model of accountability, because we have run one before. Under the National Competition Policy, payments to states and territories moved with progress against agreed reforms. Approximately $15 million of Queensland’s competition payments was withheld by the Commonwealth over a water reform commitment and restored in 2000 when the commitment was met.
The point is not that we should recreate the National Competition Policy, and financial consequence is not the answer to every water problem. The point is more fundamental: consequence is a design choice.
Australia once designed an intergovernmental reform system in which independent assessment mattered because it could affect what happened next, and a national water architecture in which assessment sat close to the table where first ministers made decisions. We do not need to return to 2004. We do need to remember the lesson: an assessment with no consequence eventually becomes just another report.
The other half of “after” cannot be delivered by funding formulas or compliance processes, because a government can hold every legal power it needs and still be unable to carry a hard decision alone.
Governments need the confidence of other governments to implement national reform, and they need the confidence of communities, industries, Traditional Owners and water users to make difficult decisions stick. We have both seen reform stall not because the policy was wrong, but because trust between the people and institutions needed to deliver it had broken down.
People are far more likely to accept hard decisions when the process was fair, the evidence was honestly weighed, and the decision-makers explain not just what they decided but why. A strategy can say what should happen; it cannot create the relationships needed to make it happen.
Implementation is a skill in its own right: taking good evidence, turning it into sound policy, securing the investment, aligning institutions and incentives, working through competing interests, and then delivering something people can actually see on the ground. The strategy matters. The capability to implement it is what makes it real.
Industry conveners can help build that capability by bringing people together to share experience and connect practical solutions with policy development. AWA’s member-led advocacy brings water sector evidence and expertise into national reform discussions, helping inform how commitments can be delivered on the ground.
The answer is not another layer of reporting. It is to make the reporting, funding and decision-making machinery we already have work together, so that assessment leads to action. We see three practical moves.
First, make commitments visible and accountable. Each jurisdiction has to own its response. Each government should respond formally to the Productivity Commission’s findings and table that response in its own parliament: a clear, public account of what it accepts, what it does not, what it will do, by when, and how progress will be measured. Nothing thrives without water.
Decisions about its future are too important to disappear into a generic national statement or a line buried in an intergovernmental communiqué. They should be visible to citizens, parliaments and the water sector, and progress should be there for everyone to see and track. This needs no new institution; tabling a response to a major report is among the oldest practices parliaments have. What is new is only the commitment to do it everywhere, every cycle.
Second, use the National Water Agreement to connect assessment, commitment and consequence. The Agreement now being settled between governments is a live opportunity to build consequence back into national water reform, not as punishment, but as a way of making commitments credible.
What made the National Water Initiative hold for two decades was shared ownership: built by every government before any was asked to sign, money on the table, and reporting that reached the leaders who could act. The new Agreement can carry that design forward, so the assessment cycle connects to the commitments each government makes and to what follows when they are met or missed.
Third, build the conditions for implementation. Australia already has funding mechanisms; what is missing is the connection between national priorities, independent assessment and investment. Where the Commission identifies a critical reform gap, national funding should support the action needed to close it, with transparent milestones and reporting.
The detail of how belongs to the Agreement negotiations now under way; the principle is the point: independent findings should help steer national investment. Responsibility for water sits primarily with the states and territories; many of the benefits and consequences of reform are national.
Trust is not an optional extra to implementation; it is part of implementation. Co-design happens before the decision, while there is still something meaningful to influence. For difficult reforms, affected communities, industries, Traditional Owners, scientists and other interests need to be involved early enough to influence the outcome, while decisions stay where the law puts them. Not everyone gets what they want, but people can see themselves in the process.
The next generation of water reform will reach beyond the water portfolio, across climate, cities, agriculture, infrastructure and regional development. That makes the connection between assessment and action more important.
Australia does not need to be told again that water reform is difficult. What we need is a system that is better at moving from knowledge to action.
The report has landed, and we know much of what it will tell us. The opportunity now is to use the National Water Agreement, our existing funding arrangements and the institutions we already have to make commitments credible, bring the right people together, and turn what we know into change on the ground.
What we do after the report lands is ours to choose.
Interested in learning more about advocacy at AWA? Learn more here.
Karlene Maywald was South Australia's Minister for the River Murray and Water Security through the Millennium Drought, chaired the National Water Commission, and chaired WaterAid Australia. Amy Dysart is director and principal of In-Depth Strategy and a non-executive director of the Australian Water Association.