Infrastructure is boring.

That’s what Australian policymakers for the last two decades have seemed to think.

Rather than planning for the future, too many politicians and governments have neglected the hard but necessary work of imagining what Australia’s built environment will need 50 years from now. Huge changes in industry, technology and housing have left enormous sections of our national infrastructure scrambling to keep up – or just falling further and further behind.

There are several reasons why this has happened. Privatisation and the rise of “consultancy culture” has hollowed out the public service and its institutional knowledge, and left governments captured by vested interests. For-profit companies are unlikely to consider any aspect of the projects they undertake other than profitability. And offshoring has sidelined the knowledge and experience of local workers who understand – and care about – the context and environment in which they work.

The results of this neglect are all around us. Investment in electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure like charging stations, especially outside the major cities, hasn’t kept pace with the rising demand for EVs. Cars banked up in regional towns along the Pacific Highway during the summer holidays as people waited to recharge. An important part of the energy transition is being held back by a simple lack of planning.

The same is true of our energy infrastructure. The number of largescale solar projects in the pipeline is bottoming out because our ageing grid is struggling to cope with the influx of renewables. Large amounts of energy generated by solar farms like Molong are going to waste – as is much of the electricity coming from millions of rooftop solar panel installations.

A lack of decent city planning is also letting people down. Property developers have been given free rein to build thousands of uninsulated, dark-roofed houses that rely entirely on air conditioning to keep cool. The suburbs these houses stand in are often built at the absolute limit of the urban fringe, with no access to decent public transport or basic amenities like parks, footpaths or shops. Many have only one access road in and out, creating enormous traffic snarls and presenting a risk in the case of natural disaster – which many of these suburbs are especially vulnerable to, being built in fire- or flood-prone areas. And areas that experience scorching temperatures have been completely cleared of trees, turning houses and tarmac into outdoor ovens and forcing people inside to their air con.

From the $50bn debacle that was the Turnbull government’s “mixedtechnology model” for the NBN to the ongoing failures on NSW’s public transport system, treating the complex and interlocking demands of our society as opportunities to make money has resulted in spectacular policy failures over and over again. The only people who benefit are a handful of investors and shareholders, who leave everyone else to deal with the consequences and clean up their mess. If we don’t urgently change this mindset, we could end up like the United States, with its crumbling roads, bridges and water infrastructure.

The Federal Government’s $15bn National Reconstruction Fund (NRF) is a welcome opportunity to start addressing this. After nearly a decade of inaction from the previous government, a big, ambitious plan to re-establish domestic manufacturing and build some badly needed national infrastructure is a refreshing change of pace. But throwing money at new projects won’t magically solve the underlying problems. If big businesses are given blank cheques without any conditions, they’ll do what they’ve always done – spend taxpayer money on enormous white elephants that worsen the problems they’re supposed to fix. amwu.org.au

That's why the NRF board needs the perspectives of workers when deciding where to spend its money. This can’t be through some box-ticking consultation process either. Workers must be in the room where these decisions are being made.

The idea that executives and public servants know more about manufacturing, infrastructure or construction than working people do isn’t just insulting – it's been disproven repeatedly by their own failures. Worker representation on boards is why industry superannuation funds consistently outperform commercial funds. Having worker representation on the board of the NRF would help ensure that $15bn doesn’t go to waste.

Because they’ll be trusted with public money, businesses that receive NRF funding should also demonstrate a willingness to consider the social, human and environmental effects of the projects they undertake. Requiring those businesses to have a collective bargaining agreement with their workers would help weed out those that see the NRF as an opportunity to put more money in executives’ pockets.

The NRF is a massive opportunity to fix our built environment – but if workers are empowered through its processes, it can become an opportunity to fix our policymaking as well.

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