Water Supply

This bill makes wide-ranging changes to Queensland's resources, energy, and water laws. It introduces industrial manslaughter offences for the mining and resources sector, reforms how the State manages mine rehabilitation and abandoned mines, tightens scrutiny of who can hold resource authorities, extends energy consumer protections, and increases transparency of water infrastructure charges in South East Queensland.

This bill updates Queensland's dam safety laws after community concerns about how flood releases from Callide Dam and Wivenhoe Dam were handled in 2015. It makes dam owners responsible for warning downstream communities (not just notifying them), gets local councils more involved in checking dam emergency plans, and lets dam owners lower water levels when engineers find safety risks. It also cuts red tape for small dam owners and reduces overlap with workplace and mining safety laws.

This bill makes several technical fixes to Queensland's local government and planning laws. It gives councils up to two more years to adopt infrastructure plans, lets developers skip offset and refund details to speed up approvals, and cleans up inconsistencies around how-to-vote cards and outdated mayoral voting rules.

This bill makes changes across five unrelated areas of law: validating historically granted mining leases, clarifying petroleum lease renewal rules, strengthening water restriction enforcement in South East Queensland, protecting water providers' cybersecurity information from mandatory public disclosure, and repealing the never-commenced Personalised Transport Ombudsman Act 2019.

This bill expands what the Energy and Water Ombudsman Queensland (EWOQ) can do. It opens the free dispute resolution service to small businesses with higher electricity use, lets EWOQ handle credit reporting complaints against energy and water providers, and fixes a small drafting error in another energy law.

This bill changes Queensland's water laws to let SunWater's regional channel irrigation schemes be handed over to new entities owned and run by the irrigators who use them. It sets up a formal transfer process, starting with the Emerald, Eton, St George and Theodore schemes, and provides tax exemptions, staff protections and rules for moving assets, contracts and licences across to the new operators.

This bill strengthens how non-urban water take is measured and reported in Queensland, delivering on commitments made after the 2018 Independent Audit of Queensland Non-Urban Water Measurement and Compliance and the Murray-Darling Basin Compliance Compact. It creates a new regulatory framework requiring water entitlement holders to use approved measurement devices, measurement plans, and in some cases telemetry to accurately track and report their water use.

This bill replaces Queensland's Plumbing and Drainage Act 2002 with a new Plumbing and Drainage Act 2017, modernising how plumbing work is regulated. It streamlines how plumbing work is approved, toughens penalties for unlicensed work, and creates a new mechanical services licence that covers heating, air-conditioning and medical gas work in large buildings and hospitals.