Infrastructure Australia: no teeth, no money, no hope

My hope is that Warren Truss will scrap his legislation that is simply an exercise in making pointless changes, bite the bullet with real vision and courage in a totally new way and give the creation of desperately needed infrastructure a genuine chance of achievement.

Legislation must be introduced to make Infrastructure Australia an independent legal entity, free from political interference except for the right of the government of the day to hire and fire the Board. The responsibility of the Federal Government would be to give it a statutory allocation of funds in every Budget, ie, a percentage of gross income tax revenue which can’t be changed without new legislation being passed.

It must have full powers to implement projects without seeking approval from Federal and State Governments, except to establish a basis for working with them on implementation, while observing laws on construction and environment. The projects they implement must be national in character, ie, they cross State Borders or are State Projects considered to be in the national interest — not pork barrelling election stunts.

It must also have power to raise funds over and above its tax revenue allocation, either by issuing bonds or having authority to negotiate loan funds for particular projects at the same interest rate as the government itself would pay.

Another power it should have is to enter into public private partnerships and to privatise their projects once they are economically viable, using the sale proceeds to create new infrastructure.

Once this revolution happens, Infrastructure Australia will have the teeth necessary to achieve results. It will be free of the political small mindedness of governments that has plagued Australia for two centuries and retarded our development as a nation.

Its success will open the way for similar Authorities to be created in other neglected fields. Water is an urgent priority for independent action, as is health and education. These initiatives, in themselves, will be wonderful as all such ventures will help render State Governments to be absolutely unnecessary and we can vote them out of existence in a referendum with applause all round.

An undeniable fact is that the pension funds of the world have trillions of dollars to invest and they constantly look for a home for those funds every day. They ignore Australia because, even though our governments declare loudly, but insincerely, that they are open for business, they are so extraordinarily difficult to deal with, slow to act and tied down with endless regulations, that investors go elsewhere shaking their heads at the stupidity they encounter.

I can endorse their frustration as I have been negotiating with five governments for 18 years to build an Inland Railway that is crucial for rural development, and every year they come up with new reasons to delay it, hoping that I will die in the meantime.

There can be no doubt that if we don’t create an infrastructure revolution now, especially as voters are overwhelmingly in favour, we will go down in Australia’s history as the generation that frittered away the future for no valid reason.