Compliance approach and principles

Our compliance approach supports water users and the regulated community, while also helping to protect our environment. We undertake a range of compliance activities to support the community to do the right thing.

Our compliance approach

We approach compliance by:

• Informing – stakeholders understand our regulatory role and are information about how we work.
• Guiding – the regulated community are responsible for meeting their compliance obligations.
• Monitoring – we check that rules and requirements are followed and continue to perform our regulatory role.
• Responding – we act on the risks and issues that can impact the areas we regulate.
• Enforcing – we support the regulated community that do the right thing by taking compliance actions against those that don’t.

Our principles

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

• Consistent and fair: how we regulate and respond to issues is consistent and objective.
• Accountable and transparent: we do what we say we are going to do and are transparent in our decision making. We talk openly about priorities, activities and the results of our regulatory work.
• Safe and well: public health, and the safety and wellbeing of our staff are our top priorities.
• Outcomes-focussed: we select the right tools and actions to achieve effective compliance outcomes.
• Risk-based: we take a proactive, targeted approach to our regulatory work, informed by risks. We respond proportionately to non-compliance.
• Timely: we are timely in how we respond and communicate about our activities and outcomes.
• Supportive: we aim to enable and encourage the regulatory community to do the right thing and empower staff to respond appropriately to non-compliance.
• Flexible: We monitor our progress and adjust our activities and actions to changes in the regulatory environment to continue to achieve compliance outcomes.
• Continuous improvement: We are committed to being a best-practice regulator. We continue to review and improve our performance – learning from others and leveraging advances in technologies.