VICTORIA'S new Coalition government has conceded it will struggle to deliver a ''road map'' for the state's water and sustainability future within 100 days of winning office, in what looms as its first broken promise.
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The road map will guide reforms to planning, regulation, pricing and management of water and urban sustainability issues, and it was promised under the Coalition's ''Living Melbourne, Living Victoria'' policy.
Under the 100-day promise, the road map should be delivered no later than the first week of March by a ''taskforce and an external advisory panel''.
But new Water Minister Peter Walsh conceded yesterday there was significant doubt the deadline would be met: ''The 100 days was very ambitious and will be challenging - we will have [the taskforce and panel] set up, but to have a report in 100 days is going to be extremely challenging.''
He said members of the taskforce and panel had not yet been chosen but a shortlist of candidates was being developed.
Opposition water spokesman John Lenders said the Baillieu government was already backtracking. ''Mr Baillieu and his team went to the Victorian people promising to fix problems and meet deadlines,'' he said. ''This is yet another example of how they overcommitted in what they said they will do.''
But Mr Walsh was certain that another promise within the Living Melbourne, Living Victoria document would not prove too ambitious: a commitment to find a use for 130 billion litres of recycled water by 2018. This pledge is dramatically more optimistic than one made by the Brumby government, which had advised that uses for about 40 billion litres of the recycled water could be found by 2050.
The water will come from the Eastern Treatment Plant at Carrum, and Mr Walsh said new spending might be needed to transport the recycled water to other areas for use.
He flagged the proposed ''Bunyip foodbowl'' - which would establish a vegetable-growing district around Pakenham and Kooweerup - as a project that would be investigated as a possible destination for the water.
Mr Walsh dismissed notions of piping the water to Northern Victoria, piping it into the Yarra to boost environmental flows, or sending it to Gippsland to cool power stations.
He said the Coalition's hopes of minimising the costs of the desalination plant would initially focus on a ''statement of obligations'' created by former minister Tim Holding, which suggests the plant should run at full capacity so long as the state's dam levels are below 65 per cent full.
Mr Walsh will meet with water ministers from the Murray-Darling Basin today in Albury, where discussions over a new chairman for the Murray-Darling Basin Authority are expected to take place but not be finalised. He said he still believed work on the basin plan should be paused until a federal parliament inquiry submits its findings on the socio-economic impacts of returning water to the river system.
