Authorities have no idea how much water is being pulled from WA or if it is being taken legally, as the government agency responsible was not doing the necessary monitoring and enforcement required.
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00:00Amid a drying climate in WA and increasing demand for water, WA's Auditor-General has
00:09found the agency tasked with managing the precious resource is not doing anywhere near
00:14enough to protect it.
00:16The Department doesn't know if water licence conditions are being complied with or indeed
00:19how much water is being taken.
00:21The report found the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation has not adequately
00:26planned its water monitoring activities, does not know if conditions are being complied
00:31with or how much water is being used.
00:34There's 12,000 licences to extract more than 4 trillion litres of groundwater each year
00:40in WA, usually for agriculture and mining operations.
00:44The audit, which spanned three years to July 2024, found only 5% of those licence holders
00:51were inspected to ensure compliance, leaving most to self-report water usage.
00:57On-ground inspections have reduced by two-thirds over the last three years and we found in
01:032023-24 that on-ground inspections didn't actually occur in three of the six regions across the
01:09state.
01:10The audit also found more than 16,000 potential non-compliance issues were reported to the
01:17department but around 90% were not investigated.
01:21It's effectively telling us that we don't know how much water is being removed from the
01:25ground, from surface water, and it's effectively saying to industry users that they're free
01:30to take whatever they want because no-one is watching.
01:32I understand there's only, I think, seven compliance officers around the state as per the report.
01:39We need much more resourcing and I'd like to see the state government increase this in the state budget.
01:45The department says it's established a new division to tackle some of these issues and
01:50enhanced operational procedures, while the state government says changes have been made
01:55to strengthen water compliance and enforcement efforts.