Actual sustainable water solutions for Australian urban communities

8. Evaluate, deliver and measure performance of strategy using firm, precise, contractually-based targets with the stakeholders/owners of the utility.

Experience to date is that most have delivered glossy documents and then management or politcal changes has caused the strategic delivery to be replaced with piecemeal short-term tactical actions which have inevitably undermined the vision of their agreed long-term strategy.

Some of these strategies had longterm budgets in the millions, while the four city-sized settings have committed to $billion investments that will have significant failure impacts because they failed to be visionary, instead adopting short-term tactical delivery to continue the seemingly preferred crisis management tradition often based on an ill-informed, short-termpolitical agenda. Having worked in NSW's major water and land resource department (DLWC), I was the architect of a guideline to assist regional water authories to develop " Integrated Water Cycle Management (IWCM)" strategies that would address their communities/customers' future water and wastewater security.

In July 2003, I was appointed as Technical Project Advisor to serve a newly-formed Water Expert Panel, led by the Late Ian Kiernan AO, and within 2 months offered a full blown triple bottom line evaluation of 7 scenarios to resolve Sydney's water crisis, once and for all. The Minister was "not amused" and wanted a desalination plant which was ranked 7 out of 7 (at that time the biggest reverse osmosis dealination plant in the world). In late 2003, I did not recommend desalination as Sydney's "solution" to the drought (Krugar from ABC 2005). In April 2004, the NSW governemnt published and endorsed these IWCM guidleines, in a depleted format, that was hobbled due to the interference from bluffocrats in NSW Environmnet, Health, Planning and Premiers Departments to ensure that "vision and sustainabiility" strategy were replaced by short-term, unchallenging tactical decisions.

The original IWCM guidelines were published in April 2004 in a much censored, impotent form. After 18 years, they are only now being reviewed, having failed to delver on their orginal potential. To worsen the IWCM approach, NSW Water turned it into a consultant-run process, as opposed to a utility staff/community/stakeholder engagement process, which resulted in the approach being adhered to only in principle, while in reality it declined into a traditional engineering approach driven by consultants to deliver construction of assets that their colleagues would be engaged to construct.

In the one project I retained advisory control over as a consultant adviser to their strategic planning staff, they attained a score of 92/100 in terms of meeting the SWCM objectives.

To illustrate this, I will recap the actions proposed in the NSW government's Draft Greater Sydney Water Strategy (GSWS), which was driven by NSW Water's Chief Strategist with the assistance of Sydney Water's Head of Strategy. As an exercise, try testing the GSWS against the principles in SWCM. The ratings (1-10) shown after each principle are my assessment.

Using the SWCM approach, the GSWS document performs as follows:

1. Looked only within city and ignored up and downstream impacts (3)

2. Did not conceive it had a need to examine its catchment context (1)

3. Showed no evidence of considering other issues/impacts for other stakeholders (2)

4. Failed to clearly articulate the picture of success for the strategy (1)