Victoria’s new Water Plan: a roadmap toward reconciliation

I came across this document by chance. Water for Victoria is the State’s strategic plan for water management. The plan was released on 20 October by the Premier and Minister for Water. Media release is here. There does not appear to have been much media coverage.

What both impressed me and surprised me is that the Plan explicitly includes Victorian Aboriginal traditional owners as a key stakeholder. Chapter Six (pages 98-109) deals specifically with Indigenous access to water. The Implementation Plan in the Appendix explicitly identifies Victorian traditional owner groups as a key stakeholder across a range of areas.

While I don’t propose to make a detailed assessment of the merits of the Plan, it strikes me as both comprehensive and refreshingly transparent. It is apparent that there has been a good policy process underpinning its development.

The Plan foreshadows the establishment of an Aboriginal Water Reference Group, with a role to advise on strengthened Aboriginal involvement in the water sector, and commits the Government to incorporating Aboriginal values and knowledge in water resource planning.

It seems clear that since the passage of the Traditional Owner Settlement Act in 2010, (an innovative approach to short circuiting lengthy native title claims across Victoria), Aboriginal Victorians have been taken much more seriously across the breadth of government. This current plan is tangible demonstration that this is the case.

One lesson is that institutional reforms provide stepping stones to greater political influence for Indigenous interests, and create a social and political environment where diversity thrives, and Aboriginal communities can feel that they belong not just to ‘country’, but to the wider society. To reprise Canadian Minster Jody Wilson-Raybould’s argument (see previous post), reconciliation requires changes to the distribution of political power across society, relevant interests and stakeholders. On the evidence of this Plan, the Victorian Government appears to be laying out a roadmap with real potential for greater inclusion of Aboriginal interests, at least in the water sector.

A second complementary insight however is that roadmaps do not take you to a destination.  They need to be acted upon; not once, but on a sustained basis. In the case of Victorian water policy, there will be opportunities for Indigenous interests to engage with the policy process, interact with other interest groups (all of whom are likely to be professionally supported) and be actively involved in the day by day interplay of policy development. To do so effectively, Indigenous interests will need to be organised, have access to professional support and briefings, apply a strategic vision, and work in unison amongst themselves. This may well be the larger challenge for Indigenous interests. And in the longer term, a failure to take up opportunities by Indigenous interests will not be in the interests of the Victorian Government either.

If the Government appoints random individuals to the proposed reference group, without the backup support that organised interest groups provide to their representatives, then the opportunity presented by Water for Victoria will be wasted.

For their part, Victorian Aboriginal groups should consider their own mechanisms for representation in water policy, and ensure that whoever is appointed has access to professional advice and briefing. I don’t know enough about water policy nor Victorian Indigenous politics to know if this will be an issue or not, but it is an issue which resonates more broadly and so is a point worth making.

For example, the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council appears to suffer from this exact issue. Its Indigenous members while all extremely well networked, as a group appear to bring limited institutional affiliations to the Council and as a consequence the Council appears to have played a more limited role in policy development than might have been expected.

In summary, the strategic plan for water policy in Victoria is at once a source of optimism, given the opportunities inherent for greater inclusion of Indigenous interests, particularly in relation to the management of ‘country’; but also presents risks and challenges for both Government, and in particular Indigenous interests, to ensure they make the most of those opportunities.