Respected leaders – panel discussion
Sir Rod Eddington AO
1990s across a broad range of policy levers and sectors. To some extent, that has run its course, and there has been an effort to identify what the next wave of reform is. That’s where the work of the Productivity Commission came in through the ‘Shifting the Dial’ report. The report was an attempt to try and ascertain and identify what a modern-day reform agenda looks like. Some of it looks a lot like the past, but some of it is reaching into new areas like health, education and infrastructure. Some of the process is about furnishing government with long-term ideas – setting the beacon out there on the horizon. It isn’t necessarily about us berating politicians for their lack of reform appetite, because they have a lot to deal with in the short term. But it is incumbent on us as policymakers and policy advisers to get out there and argue the case in public. Currently, there is a long-term reform agenda there. I’m optimistic about it, but I think we need to manage the dual role of long-term advocacy with the public and provide government with short-term actionable items that can build towards that.
RE: In that regard, business has some obligations in encouraging the process, not only in supporting the work you do, but also in encouraging politicians to take a longerterm view. MBr: I agree, and it’s about taking a broad view rather than a narrow one. RE: Ailie, you sit at both ends of this as a Senior Vice President at Bechtel. You sit here in Australia, dealing with the day-to-day reality of delivering big projects balanced against your other role as President of Bechtel Infrastructure. You are involved in looking at what’s happening globally around the long-term thinking; the project pipelines. How do you marry the short term – the tyranny of the urgent, such as ensuring that you have enough skilled tradespeople – against keeping a 15-year view of the pipeline? Ailie MacAdam (AM): We rely on visibility of the pipeline, which is fundamentally important to decisions on where we’re going to invest. As a global company, we make decisions on which region we’re going to invest in and where we’re going to place our best talent, and that is driven by visibility of pipeline
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