The Natural Resources Access Regulator (NRAR) has marked its first anniversary by dramatically increasing its workload and boosting its investigation efforts.
Chief Regulatory Officer for NRAR, Grant Barnes said the recent Budget allocated an additional $5.1million to the Regulator to enable it to continue ensuring fair management of water across the State.
“We have received over 4,000 hotline calls or emails to date — an average of 12 a day — with 773 of these being breach allegations,” Mr Barnes said.
“When we took over the State’s water regulation on 30 April 2018, we inherited 483 cases of alleged breaches from previous water regulation Agencies. We’re working our way through these cases, with only 30 remaining.”
Outlining the NRAR’s work over the past 12 months he said it had received 70 per cent more cases for investigation, with 80 per cent more cases finalised.
“There have been five times as many allegations of unlawful water-take received and four times as many directions issued to landholders to remove unlawful water management works,” Mr Barnes said.
He said there had been nine prosecutions in court with three guilty verdicts.
“We’ve achieved a lot in our first year, we hit the ground running and we will not slow down when it comes to protecting the State’s precious water resources,” Mr Barnes said.
“We have doubled our initial complement of 73 officers; the majority of NRAR’s 145 staff are on the front line undertaking licensing, targeted investigations, monitoring and auditing across the State.”
He said that while the Regulator was proud of what it had achieved so far “we know that there is plenty more to do and we are just getting started”.
