Time to give our rivers and wetlands a fighting chance – A long-overdue review of ground and surface water management in western Vic is underway

Last year we shared the story of how NGT tried to seek a common-sense outcome for the upper Wannon River in the Grampians National Park. If you’d like to understand how that rather unfortunate sequence of events unfolded, then you can find those stories listed in reverse chronological order here.

If you don’t have time review all the background, then this abbreviated 5-dot-point summary is a good alternative place to start! –

• Flows from two of the most reliable headwater streams of the upper Wannon River in the Grampians National Park have been diverted away from the river to Lake Bellfield (an artificial dam in another catchment) since 1971.
• Under current operating rules, the diversions take as much water as the diversion pipes can physically capture each winter and spring from 1st June to the 31st October inclusive every year.
• With instream dryness exacerbated by the diversions in the below average rainfall winter of 2024, the upper Wannon River in the Grampians National Park subsequently burned in its entirety for the first time in living memory during the following (2024/25) summer bushfires.
• In the aftermath, NGT asked the Victorian Government to prioritise the ecological health of this section of the river during its post-fire recovery phase, by specifically requesting that the diversions not be operated in the winter and spring of 2025, to increase flows to the river.
• After making multiple requests to different levels of government, our request was refused, and the diversions remained fully operational in 2025, resulting in almost half of the upper Wannon River flow above the nearest downstream gauging point (the Jimmy Creek campground weir), being diverted away from the river.

I’ve recounted this background because, in their response to NGT, the Victorian Government advised that the best opportunity to alter or improve the operating rules for the Wannon River diversions, would be when the Western Regional Sustainable Water Strategy (Western Region SWS) was next reviewed. Given that the Western Region SWS was last reviewed in 2011, this is not something that comes around very often!

Fortuitously, we didn’t have to wait for long, because the review of the Western Region SWS is now underway, with consultation now open on the scoping paper. Apparently this is the first in several steps that will unfold between now and the end of 2027, when the revised Western Region SWS is scheduled for completion.

The large swathe of western Victoria that this process is proposed to cover is shown below.

Although I have highlighted the upper Wannon River diversions above, as an important topic in surface water management that would ideally be reviewed to improve river health, this is far form the only issue that needs attention.

One of the key overarching issues in western Victoria has been the step-change in winter rainfall that we’ve experienced since 1997. Further, given a non-linear relationship between rainfall and runoff, this decline in rainfall during the cooler months has had a disproportionate (i.e. even larger) impact on runoff to our rivers and is also causing a reduction in recharge to groundwater aquifers (you learn more about some of the quirks of groundwater recharge by reading about this interesting, recent UNSW research).

I raise this particular dilemma, because – somewhat perversely but entirely predictably – the drying climate is now increasing demand and usage of water allocations across regional areas, at the very same time that surface water storages and groundwater resources are becoming less reliable and less secure.

All the while, our natural systems – like our rivers and wetlands, that also need access to water to function and retain their values – are feeling the strain, and this directly impacts the species (including many threatened species) that rely on them.

For a groundwater example, the shallow groundwater systems in the near-border zone of western Victoria, west of Casterton, have experienced a decline of several metres in some instances over the past few decades. For wetlands in this zone, especially those that rely on the seasonal expression of shallow groundwater at the surface (e.g. the Nationally significant Boiler Swamp System, listed in “A Directory of Important Wetlands in Australia”), a declining groundwater table is driving a silent loss of inland freshwater wetlands at an enormous scale. Unfortunately, being largely out of sight and poorly understood means that this trend of groundwater decline is escaping the attention of the public and government policy makers.

I’ve touched on just two issues here, but of course there are many more across western Victoria’s surface and groundwater systems that will also need to be considered and addressed.

It is clear to me that we have some serious thinking to do, because humans can’t simply keep on using water the way we have been and naively hope that everything will stay the same. Indeed, things are already changing before our eyes and the best time to make the necessary adjustments is right now.

The pointy-end of the process to review the Western Region SWS will unfold in 2027, but – if you care about the type of issues I’ve touched on here and want to see the community do better – we suggest that you get involved from the start and subscribe to updates, to ensure you can have your say.

You can learn more, see the scoping paper and find out what you need to do to provide feedback or attend an information session by clicking on this link.

Feedback on the scoping paper is due by the 23rd August.