Peter Harris AO Despite broad consensus across the political divide around the importance of infrastructure investment to productivity growth, Productivity Commission Chairman, Peter Harris AO, asks why it is that Australia continues to under-invest. First, let me say, it’s great that infrastructure investment has never been as popular as it seemingly is today. Most of us are commuters, and many of us are also regular airport users, and maybe that makes this renewed interest in infrastructure sound like a more than fair thing. But there is still a need for some structured thinking to intrude on such a rosy scene. The idea that there is an infrastructure gap has persisted for some time, and perhaps there is. But even if there is a gap, the lessons we have learned over the past 10 years about how to address infrastructure suggests that it’s best not to simply rush in and fund the next big project that claims to be ready to go. You don’t fill gaps measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars with an icon project or three, no matter how iconic it is. The better approach is to undertake a review of all the factors that go together to address the infrastructure conundrum. And that conundrum is: we all favour more investment in this basic underpinning of productivity improvement, but we continually seem to be under-investing – why? And since, in my assessment, this question needs to be properly reviewed, I am not going to solve it here today.
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futurebuilding
Volume 4 Number 1
