Why Governance and Collaboration Are the Treatment for the Murray–Darling’s Future
It was a privilege to present at the Peter Cullen Trust’s 2025 Unconvention professional development day — a space dedicated to challenging assumptions, sharing hard truths, and thinking differently about Australia’s water future.
What follows is a written version of what I presented: a reflection on the Murray–Darling Basin as a living system, where the limits of regulation are becoming clear, and where governance, trust, and collaboration will determine whether reform can adapt to a changing climate and growing social pressures.
The Murray–Darling Basin is like a living body — vast, complex, and deeply interconnected — but wounded.
Over decades, Australia has tried to heal this system. We’ve applied reforms like the Basin Agreement, the Cap, The Living Murray initiative, the National Water Initiative, the Water Act, and finally, the Basin Plan. Together, they’ve acted like a bandage — rules and collaboration to keep the system alive.
This of it this way:
- The Commonwealth is the head – setting direction
- The Murray–Darling Basin Authority is the veins and bloodstream – stewarding the river system
- The states are the limbs – delivering plans and managing water on the ground
Together, this partnership — backed by billions in public investment — has improved efficiency, returned water to the environment, and slowed the decline in river health.
But while we’ve stopped the bleeding, the patient isn’t healed. The hardest work lies ahead.
Rules and regulation have got us by. But how we work together — will determine whether this wounded body can adapt to its new challenges.
The Diagnosis: Systemic Dysfunction
Three structural problems are holding the Basin back.
1. Fragmented Governance
The high point of national water reform was the National Water Initiative stewarded by the National Water Commission. It provided vision, drove incentives, and held governments accountable.
Its absence has left a vacuum.
Today, no institution connects national purpose with local delivery or holds jurisdictions to account. Without a referral of powers and weak foundations of trust, the Basin Plan has struggled to function as intended. Governments pull in different directions. The head and limbs rarely move in sync.
The current federal government came to office promising renewed national leadership on water reform. That promise has quietly faded.
2. The Limits of a Government-Led Approach
Government cannot keep carrying this alone.
The easy wins are gone. Resources are finite. While Sustainable Diversion Limits and environmental water plans remain essential, they only manage volumes — not relationships.
Water resource plans have become overly prescriptive and process-heavy. They manage compliance but do little to foster innovation, incentives, or collaboration across sectors and communities.
The challenges ahead are too complex for regulation alone.
3. A System Unfit for Emerging Challenges
The Basin framework was not designed for the realities now confronting it.
Climate change is amplifying droughts, floods, and ecological stress — yet diversion limits remain unadjusted for these shifts. Disputes will grow in frequency and intensity. Some industries will need to adapt or contract. Trade-offs between competing needs will become increasingly difficult, and communities will face growing stress and fragmentation as polarisation and extreme events intensify.
Despite this, public messaging continues to suggest we are “on track” and that everything will be okay.
This narrative masks a deeper truth: the challenges facing the Basin are systemic, not just hydrological. Beyond water accounting and targets, we face fundamental questions about adaptation, fairness, and shared responsibility.
The Treatment: A Shared Path Forward
With the Basin Plan review underway, it’s time for a shift.
We need to move from command-and-control to co-design — from doing policy to people, to doing it with them.
Co-Design at the Catchment Scale
Australia should pilot and incentivise community forums in key catchments to co-design place-based responses to climate and water risk.
These forums would:
- Build shared understanding of risk and limits
- Confront conflict openly and honestly
- Enable difficult conversations about trade-offs
- Ground reform in lived experience and local values
This isn’t about consultation theatre. It’s about creating durable social licences for adaptation.
A National Vision That Actually Guides Action
Local solutions need national coherence.
We don’t need another national agreement full of aspirational principles. We need a clear national strategy that:
- Sets direction
- Incentivises collaboration
- Links funding to outcomes that align with that vision
Rebuilding an Independent National Institution
Finally, Australia needs an independent national body — similar in spirit to the National Water Commission — to act as a trusted guardian of reform.
This body would:
- Connect the moving parts of the system
- Keep focus on outcomes and fair process
- Ensure the process to achieve outcomes is robust, fair and balance burdens and benefits across jurisdictions and communities
Yes, governance reform and community engagement take time and effort.
But so do buybacks, policy stalemates, and the economic and social fallout when people lose trust in reform.
A Body Needs a Heart
The Murray–Darling Basin can survive new pressures — but only if it adapts.
To do that, it needs a heart that brings coherence, grounds reform in people, guides action with strategy, and holds the system together through trusted coordination.
Opportunities to shape national water policy are infrequent. The Basin Plan review is an opportunity to put your view forward and shape policy directions that determine whether future reform is something imposed on communities, or shaped by them.
Let’s use this moment to call for more ambition, deeper collaboration, and courageous change.
