Victorian government fails to deliver $36 million water register
The cost of building a new Victorian water register has blown out to at least $36m. But after five years it is still not operational.
The Allan government has failed to deliver on a 2020 commitment to build a new Victorian water register, despite pumping $36m of taxpayers’ funds into the project.
The IT project has already blown out from its original $26m costing, with Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action staff stating “the core of it is still operating on the old system”, which was built in 2007.
The failure to deliver the project has meant the half-built system repeatedly crashes when trying to process large volumes of Goulburn to Murray intervalley trade.
“The heart of it, that records entitlement and ownership outcomes is (still) on the old platform,” DEECA staff said.
The repeated crashes have forced administrators to use manual processing for all intervalley trading this year, with irrigators and brokers given a seven-hour window to lodge their applications, which are then randomly selected and manually processed.
“The approach reduces load on the VWR (register) during the trade opening and ensures the opportunity is reliably made available to all market participants,” register administrators reported.
Victorian Farmers Federation water council chair Andrew Leahy said “they keep promising it will be done, but here we are five years later on and we’re still nowhere”.
The register upgrade has been funded by an environmental contribution levy on all rural and urban water corporations, which they in turn collect through customers’ water bills.
DEECA’s reports show it has struggled since 2020 to deliver the project, ultimately bringing in new blood in 2022, when it “onboarded a new implementation partner”.
But from December 2022 to July 2023, DEECA reported that “slippage in provision of deliverables triggered a review of the project”.
“The review forecast higher than anticipated increase in costs to complete the project. The review also identified an alternative approach to delivering Victorians a new secure and reliable Victorian Water Register,” it found.
DEECA even renamed what it had called Project Transform: “A new project and governance structure (the Evolve Project) has been established to continue delivery of a new Victorian Water Register that aligns with the Victorian government’s 2024-25 budget outcomes.”
Victorian Water Minister Gayle Tierney was apporached for comment, but referred the matter to DEECA, whose spokesman failed to answer a series of questions on what had caused the delays and when the new register would be operational.
The spokesman simply said “we are working towards delivering a new Victorian Water Register”.
According to DEECA’s expenditure report $36m in tranche five levies had been spent on the register project by June 30 last year:
•2020–21 expenditure: $3,909,000
•2021–22 expenditure: $4,280,000
•2022–23 expenditure: $11,640,000
•2023–24 expenditure: $16,090,000
DEECA also reported that “in addition to the funding provided through EC5 for this initiative, a further $6.34m in co-contribution was provided from the Victorian Water Register Trust”. It remains unclear if this means the total cost is now $42.3m.
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