Managing Queensland’s regional water quality

Tabled Report 7: 2024–25

Tabled date

2024-12-18

Report year

2024-25

Community amenities Community welfare Health Infrastructure Local government Natural resources

Entities audited

Not identified in the published HTML audit scope.

Recommendations

1. QAO's text Addressed to: all councils

   assess their record keeping of essential activities for managing drinking water quality to ensure they are

   • maintaining up-to-date standard operating procedures
   • recording maintenance and inspection results
   • developing schedules and timelines for upcoming periodic activities
   • recording verification monitoring (regular water testing) results and analysis of water quality trends

2. QAO's text Addressed to: all councils

   ensure appropriate oversight of compliance with management plans, risks to drinking water quality, improvement actions, and recommendations from independent audits

3. QAO's text Addressed to: all councils

   assess and address identified capability and expertise gaps

4. QAO's text Addressed to: all councils

   test their emergency response plans periodically for high-risk events, and train staff in how to respond.

5. QAO's text Addressed to: the Department of Local Government, Water and Volunteers

   improves coordination with its water regulation and local government functions, and across agencies by developing mechanisms to coordinate and share information, and promote workforce and infrastructure planning with providers

6. QAO's text Addressed to: the Department of Local Government, Water and Volunteers

   develops a pathway for adopting health-based targets by

   • assessing the regulatory impact of fully implementing the targets and the public health risks of not adopting them. This should include identifying the costs and benefits
   • publishing an implementation plan with a timeline and communication strategy – to give councils more clarity for their infrastructure and operational planning.

7. QAO's text Addressed to: the Department of Local Government, Water and Volunteers

   improves its risk-based approach to assessing and managing providers by

   • ensuring it completes its annual compliance risk assessment of providers
   • recording more detailed documentation of the sources of information and explanations for the risk rating it gives to each provider when assessing whether they are likely to comply with their legislative obligations
   • aligning its compliance risk assessments and plan to direct and prioritise resources
   • developing further specific actions to manage high-risk providers

8. QAO's text Addressed to: the Department of Local Government, Water and Volunteers

   enhances its workforce planning to ensure it has sufficient resources to deliver its compliance activities, meet the demand for responding to incidents, and review the providers’ audit reports and annual reports in a timely manner

9. QAO's text Addressed to: the Department of Local Government, Water and Volunteers

   evaluates its response to non-compliance and assesses the effectiveness of outcomes from its actions

10. QAO's text Addressed to: the Department of Local Government, Water and Volunteers

    enhances the data it collects on drinking water quality and implements a process to monitor and report on water quality

11. QAO's text Addressed to: the Department of Local Government, Water and Volunteers

    improves how it measures its performance and reports externally by

    • developing specific performance measures that align with its water quality outcome in its strategic plan
    • setting clear benchmarks or targets for its performance measures and assessing its performance against these
    • changing its approach to calculating non-compliance in its service delivery statements.

Authoritative report — Queensland Audit Office

Report PDF on QAO