The Hon Tim Pallas
The Hon Tim Pallas, Treasurer of Victoria Key points: • • •
in response to the mounting pressures of rapid population growth, the Victorian Government has embarked on a substantial infrastucture investment programme industry and government need to work in tandem to address issues like resources and skills shortages, and effective procurement and delivery methods, and there is a clear need to engage with the community early in the development of projects to ensure that they have support.
Welcome to the economic hub and economic focus of the nation, Victoria. There are many challenges that we must confront as we go forward, but they’re challenges of opportunity and aspiration. Melbourne’s population has increased by 125,400 people, or about 2.7 per cent, in the year to June 2017. With the population growing at that sort of magnitude, Melbourne is effectively reducing the distance between the comparative populations of Melbourne and Sydney by about 25,000 people a year. We have enormous pressure on our infrastructure, and the challenges for Victoria are quite multifaceted. Firstly, we need to recognise as a state that we can’t simply put out applications and specifications into the public domain, and expect that we’re going to get a fully cooked proposal capable of service delivery. The state has to see itself as a partner in this process, and we have to actively involve ourselves in the way that we shape and procure the infrastructure that the community needs. We can already see an extractive materials resources shortage starting to impact
on price. When you consider that the raw components are about 30 per cent of infrastructure costs, this is something the Government is focused on. The second thing we need to recognise is we can’t continue to believe that we can be the beneficiaries of providence. For example, when we first came to Government, there wasn’t a lot of work around and it was relatively easy to put away projects. What we’ve found as we’ve started to become a lot more active in the infrastructure delivery space is that skilled workers that exported themselves from Western Australia and Queensland, because of the downturn in the construction phase of the mining boom, have reverted back to New South Wales and Victoria. They’re now fully occupied. We need to recognise that we have to grow the product at home. That’s why the state has put so much effort into developing the skills and the capability base domestically. From our perspective, when Victoria hits a population of 10.1 million, as was predicted in a 2016 report, the effort to build our skills, our resources capacity and the adept way in which we engage
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