Water Resources Data Collection and Water Accounting

A key objective of the National Water Initiative is to establish a comprehensive system of water accounting to ensure that the overarching objective to establish a nationally compatible market, regulatory and planning based system of managing surface and ground water resources can be met. In this context, the first objective of this paper is to highlight problems with the extent and quality of Australian water data collection, access to water data and ongoing auditing of data collection and archiving processes. The second objective of the paper is to propose ways to remediate these problems.