Eminent Panel
Eminent Panel
Chair: The Hon Mark Birrell, Chairman, Infrastructure Partnerships Australia The Hon Nick Greiner AC, Chairman, Infrastructure NSW Nicholas Moore, Chief Executive and Managing Director, Macquarie Group Mark Romoff, President and Chief Executive Officer, The Canadian Council for Public Private Partnerships James Stewart, Chairman, Global Infrastructure, KPMG
With Australia struggling to fund its infrastructure backlog, the Eminent Panel examines some of the priority reforms for governments, and considers the international experience in Canada and the United Kingdom. Mark Birrell: Looking at the issue of productivity and the economic circumstances facing Australia, what are your observations about the challenges and opportunities for dealing with the infrastructure backlog? Nick Greiner: The overriding challenge is to stop talking to ourselves. There is broad agreement – from government, the private sector, constructors, consultants and financiers – that productivity ought to be a major driver of criteria for an infrastructure program. It’s almost at a tipping point. We need to be fair dinkum and say that most of the things that are being suggested are making pretty slow progress – things like deregulation of pricing, the sale of assets in certain states, and other sorts of pricing and demand management reforms.
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The challenge is to take the economic or business view and explain it to the public, because you’ve got to bridge the gap. Looking at New South Wales and Queensland, why are they so recalcitrant regarding various reforms? It’s essentially because of the judgement of political leaders, on both sides of the fence, about the political acceptability of the reform program. You’ve actually got to win the politics; you can’t eliminate the politics. I do think that if we look around the world, we have a remarkable level of agreement about the fact that infrastructure is holistic – it’s not just building stuff. It starts at demand management, it starts at managing your existing assets better, it starts at operating improvements – all those things are actually the first things.
Volume 3 Number 2
3/25/13 12:45 PM
