The ACCC's 2021 Murray-Darling Basin water markets inquiry made 29 recommendations, describing a market of considerable value with far less integrity infrastructure than any comparable financial market.

Regulations were made in March 2026 for commencement on 1 July 2026, from which date the ACCC enforces the new law: obligations concerning water markets decisions, and prohibitions on conduct including market manipulation and insider trading.

This is worth recording as a reform that ran the right way. Most entries in this database ask for a step to be removed or moved. This one adds obligations — disclosure, conduct rules, and an enforcement agency with the capability to use them — and it is the correct direction. A market where participants hold non-public information about allocations, storage and government purchasing, and where trades were reported slowly and inconsistently, was a market with a structural integrity problem.

Five years from inquiry to commencement is slow. It is also the ordinary pace of building a new regulatory regime properly, and this project should not treat that as a failing when it repeatedly criticises reforms delivered before their governance was settled — as it does of the Housing Australia Future Fund.