(6) Capacity to Deliver

Australia is a world leader in various water disciplines that include hydrology, hydrogeology, water law, water and climate modeling, environmental flows, and water economics, among others. This expertise resides primarily within universities, but also within governmen<sup>t</sup> research agencies that, at a federal level, include the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), the Bureau of Meteorology and Geoscience Australia. Scientific and technical capacity also previously existed within the NWC, and some expertise resides in state agencies and in the private sector.

In a country well-endowed with scientific and social science capacity, much of this expertise has, unfortunately, not been used in relation to key decision making with respect to the basin, and even disregarded. Key implementing agencies, such as the MDBA, have relied heavily on the reports of paid consultants for key studies in relation to water reform yet, as noted by Wheeler et al. [67], many of the socio-economic consultant reports commissioned by the MDBA suffer from serious technical deficiencies. Of equal concern is sworn testimony that a key CSIRO report used in modeling the multiple benefits of the SDLs in the 2012 Basin Plan " ... was altered by the CSIRO managemen<sup>t</sup> under pressure from people at the Basin Authority" and that " ... the report was altered in a way that made it misleading" [66]. This appears to be a systemic problem, not just limited to the MDBA, as Ken Matthews, previously the head of two Australian governmen<sup>t</sup> departments and the CEO of the NWC, has observed that " ... current water decision-making processes have been designed with an assumption that good science and careful analysis will make its way up through the system, and that responsible ministerial decision makers will be at the helm to receive it. But it turns out that too often they are not" [68].
