Our role as a water regulator: compliance approach and principles

We are responsible for Queensland’s water management laws and regulate activities under the:

• Water Act 2000
• Water Regulation 2016
• River Improvement Trust Act 1940
• Water Supply (Safety and Reliability) Act 2008

The responsibilities fall under the three regulatory functions.

Sustainable water management: Protecting rivers, aquifers, and ecosystems by monitoring water usage and ensuring sustainable extraction practices.

Public health: Overseeing drinking water quality by setting standards and monitoring water service providers working in partnership with Queensland Health

Safety: Ensuring the structural integrity and safety of dams through setting standards, emergency preparation, mandatory inspections and maintenance requirements.

As regulator, we ensure that everyone understands how we:

• manage water
• measure water
• enforce water laws.

Our compliance approach

We approach compliance by guiding, informing, enabling, monitoring and enforcing.

We promote voluntary compliance through a range of educational activities. These increase the capacity and capability of the community. They include:

• providing information, resources and tools to be clear about the obligations for our regulated water community
• holding site visits, meetings, workshops and events
• promoting and reinforcing good regulatory and business practices, including promoting the benefits of complying and the potential consequences of non-compliance.

Where compliance is not achieved, we take a risk-based approach to decide how best to respond, which includes taking enforcement action when needed.

Our principles

The regulatory work we do is guided by a set of principles.

• consistent and fair: we have a consistent and fair approach to how we achieve compliance
• outcomes and risk-based: we use a proactive, outcomes-focused, targeted, risk-based approach for our compliance activities
• supportive: we encourage the community to do the right thing and empower staff to make decisions within our regulatory and governance framework
• adaptive: we monitor our progress and adjust our actions as needed
• accountable and transparent: we do what we say we are going to do, are transparent in our decision making and talk openly about priorities, activities and the results of our work
• safe and well: we support safety and wellbeing of our staff and communities
• responsive: we are timely in how we communicate about compliance and in responding to non-compliance.