Water company revelation no surprise from a government with a contempt for transparency

3 hours ago 1

December 27, 2025 — 5.15am

As you are washing your dishes or refilling glasses this holiday season, spare a thought for the customers of Greater Western Water (GWW) across Melbourne. It has been an unnecessarily stressful year for far too many of them.

You can choose what you give people for Christmas, but households and businesses cannot choose their water retailer. So when City West Water and Western Water were merged in 2021, creating a new authority for people in the CBD, inner north, Footscray, Werribee, Sunbury and Melton, customers had no choice but to trust that billing and information handling would be integrated with a minimum of disruption.

Treasurer Jaclyn Symes has provided Greater Western Water with a letter promising financial support until November next year if needed. The opposition calls it a “de facto bailout”.

As The Age’s reporting has shown, that trust has been betrayed.

When the merged service launched the $100 million-plus upgrade of its billing system in May 2024, some people found themselves being charged for their entire apartment block’s water usage. Others discovered their bills had been sent to old postal and email addresses, compromising their privacy and potentially their safety.

More than three-quarters of the service’s 600,000 customers received their bills late, while others told us they were sent text messages asking for payment of incorrect amounts. Some bills left the due date unclear.

As the problems of the new system snowballed, with each bill having to be checked manually, GWW decided to pause its direct-debit facility. Some customers did not realise and have been accruing unpaid bills. The facility is yet to be restored.

It is hardly surprising that this debacle has affected GWW’s bottom line. But on the eve of Christmas, Victorian taxpayers found a most unwelcome surprise under the tree: a letter from Treasurer Jaclyn Symes promising the company financial support until November 2026. The letter was accompanied by the belated release of the company’s annual report – months after that of every other provider – revealing a near $200 million operating cash loss and rising debts.

In July, the independent review by Nous Group into what went wrong noted that it had made some “near-term recommendations” that GWW had “implemented … quickly”. Among these was to “[develop] a proactive communications approach to better explain to the community what happened”. Is this Christmas Eve release an example of the new regime?

The timing of these revelations sums up the cynicism that permeates the conduct of government in this state. The public needs to be reassured that the sort of errors committed here won’t be allowed to happen again. Sending out this sort of information in the holiday season suggests the government and GWW are more interested in ensuring that we don’t notice.

Sadly, we have become accustomed to this contempt for public awareness on the part of officials. It has been most obvious in the state’s annual “Dump Day”, when hundreds of reports from government agencies and departments were tabled at once in a brazen bid to confound scrutiny.

Water Minister Gayle Tierney refused interview requests, with the government pointing us instead to the independent review it commissioned.

Thankfully, amendments to the Financial Management Act put forward by the Greens this year look set to end this terrible tradition. But the list of offences against transparency is a long one.

It is tempting to see the way in which the Suburban Rail Loop first came into being – outside normal planning channels and without an independent cost-benefit analysis – as the archetype. The wider regime of non-disclosure agreements surrounding its construction and that of other major infrastructure projects is an extension of the problem.

This year alone we witnessed an opaque and underhanded dismissal of Victoria Police chief Shane Patton, and CFMEU investigator Geoffrey Watson, SC, told us that the Allan government’s inquiry into corruption on the Big Build “needed actually to go inside the doors of the senior bureaucrats and actually into the ministerial offices in Spring Street. It didn’t do any of that”.

The year ends with a catalogue of the Allan government’s failure to provide crucial information to those seeking to understand our childcare crisis.

So when details of GWW’s failures were emerging, it was hardly surprising but still highly unsatisfactory that the Allan government refused our repeated requests for an interview with Water Minister Gayle Tierney in the lead-up to this report on the debacle in October. Instead, the government pointed us to the independent review it had commissioned.

Such reviews and inquiries aren’t supposed to shield bureaucrats and ministers; their purpose is to give us the tools and an agreed set of facts to talk about when analysing what went wrong. They are meant to start a conversation and a process of accountability, not to end it.

Opposition Leader Jess Wilson described Symes’ letter promising financial support to GWW as a “de facto bailout”. One has to hope that in the new year – an election year – we are not confronted with the need for an actual bailout, with all the additional uncertainty that would result.

But should that end up being the case, we need a government that is prepared to front up and answer our questions, not to fob us off with talk of reviews and reports down the track. Whether that’s a choice we’ll have come November is far from clear.

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