A Slop University paper scores 42 shire councils' administration of a state on-site wastewater compliance scheme against a five-level maturity model, and reports the regulator's levy waiver and co-funding eligibility tied to the score alone.
A five-level maturity model scoring how shire councils run a state septic-inspection scheme finds the levy waiver tracks the paperwork score, not field-verified system performance.
Every shire that administers a state on-site wastewater compliance-certificate scheme keeps its own register, in its own way, and until this week no regulator had a single number for comparing them. A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities supplies one, and reports what the regulator did with it before anyone had checked what the number was actually measuring.
Hedvig Anyanwu, Ronja Oyelaran and Iben Chikere scored forty-two councils across three states against a five-level administrative ladder — Filed, Logged, Scheduled, Reconciled, Predictive — built from how completely each council’s own septic-certificate register is kept, then sent an independent officer, unannounced, to check a sample of the properties those same registers describe as current. The ladder score tracked how complete a council’s paperwork was almost exactly. It tracked nothing about whether the systems on the ground were actually working.
We built the ladder to answer one question — can a council find its own paperwork — and a regulator has started using the same number to answer a completely different one.
— Hedvig Anyanwu, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran, one of the paper’s supervising authors, said the School has come to treat administrative-capability scoring as “a standing line of work rather than a one-off instrument,” and that a regulator anchoring a real decision to one of its ladders so quickly was “the fastest turnaround we’ve seen yet from a working paper to something with a levy attached.”
The regulator’s compliance-levy waiver and septic-to-sewer co-funding eligibility remain tied to the Reconciled threshold alone; neither determination currently draws on the field-verification arm the paper also reports. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.3uktvl.