Actual sustainable water solutions for Australian urban communities

Since Federation, Australia has faced and failed to developstrategies for resolving the seemingly unresolvable issue facing Australian water utilities, namely: future planning and delivery of sustainable water strategies that will deliver resilient, safe, secure water cycle management for our urban populations in a manner that produces minimal impact on the environment (land, rivers, estuaries and ocean).While most of us live on the coastal rim of Australia, inland regions are equally impacted, particularly in the Murray Darling Basin.

Over the last 30 years I have worked with small regional water utilities who seem to understand the one thing that the major utilities and government bureaucrats can't grasp, namely the difference between strategy and tactics. I did work for and with NSW's major utilities, but they chose to ignore suggestions and, to date, themajor utilities have dodged addressing the challenge. Every government state-owned corporation/authority produces strategy documents at great expense, yet are they strategies?

Strategy is "what". Tactics the "how". About 2,500 years ago, Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu wrote "The Art of War." In it, he said, "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." We need both strategy and tactics working as a team. The simplest definition of the difference between strategy and tactics is: "strategy is done above the shoulders, tactics are done below the shoulders". Most if not every strategist I have come across in Australian water utilities are most definitely physically and mentally happy being well below the shoulder! Quite simply it's safer, no need to be brave or visionary, usually it's secure and not likely to termination of employment for being either forthright or incompetent i.e. perfect bureaucrats that "Sir Humphrey" would be proud to recommend to the "club" for membership.

The water cycle is the simplest and most visible cycle around us. However, in the world of utilities and politics our interaction seems usually to be de-prioritised and drops down to endless crisis management.

My approach to Sustainable Water Cycle Management (SWCM) is very straightforward, transparent and most importantly embedded with measurable, attainable performance measures, forming a management/goverance perspective in which organisations and management are accountable for the success of delivery (Sir Humprey is shuddering in his grave). In layman's terms SWCM goes like this:

1. Assess the catchment context your utility sits within

2. Deteremine the issues facing that region, up and downstream

3. Identify your current impacts on others and the environment

4. Decide the outcomes/specifications for sucesss, including all stakeholders

5. Analyse the social and environmnetal outcomes of a range of scenarios (commonly known an triple bottom line) including capital, operational and lifecycle costs

6. Evaluate and agree with stakehlders including those impacted upstream, downsteam and outside the catchment where intra and inter catchment transfers may occur, either water or other resources

7. Announce and commit to the chosen scenario and then implement the strategy, using tactics developed to deliver the strategy

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)

5. Did not use triple bottom line assesment of assets, operations or lifecycle aspects of its strategy (2)

6. Did not assess the likely impacts of the delivery of its strategy on its surrounding catchment and other stakeholders (2)

7. Did not commit to and explain the long-term vision for its strategy, instead only offering a series of tactical initiatives that would be worked on (2)

8. Not suprisinngly, having failed to define a visionary strategy, no transparency, no accountability or contractually-binding performance targets were included (1).

So yes, in my opinion, this Draft GSWS document (similar to most of the 15 pilot studies I initiated in 2001) has failed on all counts of the 8 steps required by SWCM approach. The bracketed figures are the "1-10 scores" for each step, giving the GSWS a score of 15/100 (i.e. not good). On the 29^th October 2021, NSW Dept of Planning, Industry and Environment held a single Webinar lasting 1.5 hours and attended by 30-50 attendees (mostly local and state government stakeholders/consultants). I was one of only 3 independent members of the public (as far as I could ascertain). My queries were ignored and I submitted a formal submission (not made publicly available by the authors of the Draft GSWS document – should you wish to obtain a copy, please request it in a comment to this article and I will email you a copy).

The closure for submissions was only 10 days after this single, constrained public webinar "consultation". The Draft GSWS took 4 years to develop! From experience, I would expect no less when the NSW bureaucrats chosen by our politicians deliver strategies, while practitioners watch on, scratching their heads in bewilderment. Strategy works well in commerce and war because those who succeed/fail are held personally accountable, something that is anathema to Sir Humphrey and bureaucrats. Alas, the same bureaucrats are plying their strategic wares across 12 regional NSW strategies to be delivered by the end of 2022. Based on the failings of the GSWS, I fear they will deliver little, be non-strategic and under no circumstances will be delivered with accountability to the taxpayers of NSW.

Every water utility, (from small towns to metropolis-sized cities like New York or Shanghai) can attain a sustainable water solution strategy for their customers/citizens. While rocket science is not required, without clear strategic planning and leadership, it can not be envisaged, let alone developed and delivered on the ground. While our urban, and indeed rural water planning (eg the Murray Darling Basin, Lake Eyre, Timor Sea, Gulf of Carpentaria catchments), continue to be led by tacticians driving lowly bureaucrats, rather than by "above the shoulder" strategic leaders, then we will continue to fumble along from crisis to crisis. There are 250 plus water utilities in Australia, managing $50+billions worth of assists to harvest/manage our interaction with the water cycle. May I suggest that you check out your water utility's strategic plan and read it in the context of the 8 simple steps of SWCM and see how they do. Comments via OLO would be welcome so we can find the best water strategy. I know the worst from the 15 pilot studies I selected in 2001 it would be helpful if you could use the 8 simple criteria/steps of SWCM to assess how your water utility has performed.

Media and politicians announce one crisis after another, be it drought, flood, pollution incidents, health pandemics and the economic crashes. Indeed, all have been cloaked with the gravest, existential catastrophic threat, namely the climate change crisis. Within my 40 years of professional experience in studying water, I have seen at least a dozen crisis management responses to crises that should never have existed. That's what happens when strategies (such as NSW Water's November 2021 draft GSWS) are devised by tactic-level bureaucrats, with no long-term vision. Where are our strategic leaders and politicians, I ask?