CATHERINE KING – OPINION PIECE – PARTISAN STACK OF INFRASTRUCTURE AUSTRALIA NO WAY TO BUILD A COUNTRY – MONDAY, 29 NOVEMBER 2021

Infrastructure matters. Infrastructure investment is the key enabling force behind sustainable economic growth.

Investing in infrastructure projects creates jobs, boosts productivity and improves lives.

Incoming IA chairman Col Murray with his local member Barnaby Joyce.

Transport means those in marginalised suburbs and regions can take advantage of opportunity.

It allows wealth to spread, it allows people to live where they want and it builds a better, more prosperous, more connected nation.

Of course, we cannot invest in every single infrastructure project around Australia, we have neither the money nor the workers to build every idea that pops into a planner or a politician’s head. That’s why the last Labor government created Infrastructure Australia, to take the politics out of major infrastructure projects and to create a clear guide to what governments and industry needed to invest in and when those investments needed to be made.

In government, we listened to Infrastructure Australia and invested in every one of their priority projects.

In the past week, though, we have seen the Morrison-Joyce government do its best to destroy Infrastructure Australia as a major economic body.

Of the Deputy Prime Minister’s seven new appointments to the Infrastructure Australia board, one is a former Liberal branch president, one is a two-time LNP candidate, one is a current vice-president of the Queensland LNP and the new chair describes himself as “a fairly solid Barnaby supporter”.

Simply put, it is a partisan stack. We also have reason to believe that the same will soon be happening at the Australian Rail Track Corporation, the body responsible for the continually mismanaged $15 billion Inland Rail project.

These changes are a far cry from the apolitical, expert board headed by Sir Ron Eddington that Anthony Albanese first appointed at Infrastructure Australia in 2008.

It says everything about Scott Morrison’s character that he was willing to do a dirty deal with Barnaby Joyce to deliberately hobble Infrastructure Australia’s credibility. But sadly, it is only the latest deterioration in a once-proud organisation that has been continually sidelined by the Morrison-Joyce government.

The government didn’t even respond to Infrastructure Australia’s latest priority list, preferring to invest in imaginary car parks over the major projects which would lay the framework for Australia’s future economic growth.

And, as Marion Terrill from the Grattan Institute reported this year, just eight of the 32 mega projects larger than $500 million she examined had a business case that had been published or assessed at the time the money was committed.

This is a sad state of affairs and it is no way to build a country.

At The Australian Financial Review Infrastructure Summit this month, I announced that an Albanese Labor government will commission an independent review of Infrastructure Australia to report within the first year of our government and advise on what changes may be needed to IA’s focus, priorities and – if necessary – legislation.

As Australia builds back better from COVID-19, we need to be able to identify the genuinely transformational projects the nation needs to boost productivity and drive growth.

Our nation has big challenges ahead, whether that be in dealing with population growth and the move to the regions, or in decarbonising the transport and infrastructure sector and dealing with the impact of electric vehicles on our long-term needs.

Infrastructure Australia is the only body that can do that, but to do that it has to be taken seriously. Only an Albanese Labor government can be trusted to restore credibility and influence to this organisation and ensure we can use infrastructure investment to improve the lives and economic prospects of all Australians.

This opinion piece was first published in the Australian Financial Review on Monday, 29 November 2021.