How does the law provide for the management and sharing of water resources between competing human consumptive uses while also sustaining our natural ecosystems?

This question has garnered growing national attention as water becomes an increasingly contested resource in much of Australia, with recent periods of dire scarcity likely to return with the emergent impacts of climate change and increasing demands from new industry practices, especially the pursuit of energy resources.  

Australian attention to these issues in the past two decades has seen the Australian State and Commonwealth Parliaments agree a national water reform policy and undertake a national program of fundamental law reform – the most significant reform since water resources statutes were first enacted over a century ago. The Australian model of water resources law is gaining international attention as globally too water is becoming an increasingly contested and scarce resource.

This course pursues these themes through a study of Australian terrestrial water resources law, with a focus on the Murray-Darling Basin jurisdictions, including the Commonwealth, and an emphasis on water quantity management. 

Topics covered will include:

1. The Institutional Framework of water resources management, including the classification and condition of Australia's water resources, key constitutional principles and administrative agencies, and the statutory objectives of water resources management;
2. The Nature of Access Rights to Water, including the legal foundations of the access rights to water, their historical basis in the common law and current statutory public and private rights to the use and flow and control of surface and ground water;
3. Water Allocation Planning, including the history and legal purposes of planning, the main procedures of the planning system, and the core content of water plans relating to environmental water allocations and the concept of "consumptive pool";
4. Administration of Statutory Water Entitlements, including the grant, content, variation and compensation for reduction of access entitlements;
5. Water trading, including intra and inter-State transfer provisions, public register of entitlements, and environmental water trade; and
6. The model for sharing water resources in Australia.