UPFRONT
A ROADMAP
FOR REFORM
IN SEPTEMBER, INFRASTRUCTURE AUSTRALIA LAUNCHED THE 2021 AUSTRALIAN INFRASTRUCTURE PLAN. ROADS & INFRASTRUCTURE SITS DOWN WITH PETER COLACINO, CHIEF OF POLICY AND RESEARCH AT INFRASTRUCTURE AUSTRALIA, TO TALK ABOUT THE KEY PRIORITIES IDENTIFIED IN THE PLAN.
T
he first week of September marked the official launch of the 2021 Australian Infrastructure Plan, the third in a series of practical roadmaps developed by Infrastructure Australia since 2013, providing recommendations to the Australian Government to help deliver better infrastructure for the nation. Infrastructure Australia has prepared the 2021 Australian Infrastructure Plan in response to its 2019 Australian Infrastructure Audit, which identified the major challenges and opportunities facing Australia’s infrastructure over the next 15 years and beyond. Expansive in both scale and scope, the 2021 Plan comes at a critical moment in Australia’s history. It is a time when Australians are recovering from the stillunfolding COVID-19 pandemic and the bushfires, drought, floods and cyber-attacks that tested the nation’s individual and
collective resilience during 2020-2021. As Peter Colacino, Chief of Policy and Research at Infrastructure Australia points out, the Plan’s launch is also timely for the opportunities it provides for sectoral reform and adapting to technological changes, particularly around adoption of electrical vehicles. “It’s fortunate that we were due for this five-yearly review now,” he tells Roads & Infrastructure. “With the findings of the 2019 Audit, we now have an opportunity for sectoral reform and responding to changes in energy technology, changes in transport technology, and the coming together of the transport and energy around electric vehicles,” he says. “It also allows us to use the Plan to provide a roadmap for reforms that will support economic recovery in our response to COVID-19 to build back better.”
ADAPTING TO CHANGE AND UNCERTAINTY Underpinning Infrastructure Australia’s agenda, as detailed in the 2021 Plan, is a focus on population growth, adaptation to climate risk, building resilience, stimulating employment, driving economic productivity, embracing a diversity of places and social equity. As Colacino points out, the need to adapt to a faster pace of change all around the sector was clear even before the pandemic – but become even more critical after. “The first sentence in the 2019 Australian Infrastructure Audit said: ‘The pace of change is increasing, and uncertainties are growing.’ Of course, we didn’t have a crystal ball then to see a pandemic and its impacts on the sector, but we did identify rapid changes occurring around seven key trends, including those around geopolitical shifts, changes in consumer preferences, demographical
The 2021 Australian Infrastructure Plan provides Australia’s governments with a practical reform pathway focused on supporting the national COVID-19 recovery.
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