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- 10 May 2006
Coalition Infrastructure Initiatives
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The Hon. GREG PEARCE [9.58 p.m.]: Tonight I shall inform the House about some important infrastructure policy initiatives announced by the Leader of the Opposition on Friday of last week. Everyone in the Chamber knows that our State is suffering from 11 years of neglect and underinvestment in infrastructure. The Government's failure to maintain and renew our infrastructure is hurting people throughout our State on a daily basis—as they travel to work, need hospital services, or suffer in poorly maintained classrooms. Our road networks are clogged and congested, and the cross-city tunnel has become a symbol of all that is wrong with how this Government does business.
We are waiting for the Minister for Infrastructure to announce his 10-year infrastructure strategy that he promised would be delivered some weeks before the budget. At a recent Committee for Economic Development of Australia lunch, Government officials were working overtime to dampen expectations of what would be in this strategy. A senior Treasury official made it clear that the plan was not for public consumption because it might raise expectations that all the projects were real. He said:
… please don't take it we are necessarily going to do those things.
The bottom line is that the Labor Government has no plan, no commitment and no political will. The Liberal-Nationals approach will be very different. Kick-starting New South Wales will be the number one priority of a Liberal-Nationals government, starting with a series of fiscal measures to rein in spending, cut taxes and make us competitive again. Infrastructure is central to achieving competitive advantage for New South Wales, and under a Liberal-Nationals government it would be driven from the highest level of government, that is, the Premier. Mr Debnam outlined a series of structural and administrative initiatives in our plan to kick-start infrastructure renewal in New South Wales.
First, it will ensure that there is a clear, public infrastructure plan for metropolitan Sydney and New South Wales that sets out its priorities and projects for the near and long-term, including State and Federal projects. Silo-based infrastructure decision making will end, as will separate road, transport, utility and other empires intent on their own agendas. The Coalition will use the best of the successful Olympic Co-ordination Authority model to deliver a whole-of-government approach for major infrastructure projects and significant developments that should not suffer unnecessary bureaucratic delays. It is also critical that the private sector remain involved in infrastructure delivery.
The Coalition believes there is a much greater scope to involve the private sector in public infrastructure and its planning. To achieve this it will establish an infrastructure development roundtable, which the Premier will chair, with relevant Ministers, department heads and business leaders. In a further initiative the Coalition will invite representatives of universities in New South Wales to participate in its infrastructure development roundtable. That will ensure that the under-utilised intellectual and innovation capital of universities is integrated into the economic development of our State.
The Coalition will also adopt the best of the Partnerships United Kingdom model of public-private interface, in a Partnerships New South Wales entity. Its job will be to determine the best finance vehicle for each project on its merits, across a spectrum of options from full Treasury debt funding to full private funding. The Coalition will ensure that each project is funded in a way that delivers optimum public value and outcomes for taxpayers and the community, by allocating risk and responsibility appropriately in any partnership. To deliver better value to citizens, a Coalition government will centrally negotiate all public-private partnerships through Partnerships New South Wales. This entity will bring together the most experienced and brightest minds from government departments and agencies, as well as recruit talent from the private sector.
The Coalition will also speed up planning decisions. Delays, indecision and disputes have delivered New South Wales the worst planning processes and outcomes in Australia. If we are to build more and better infrastructure we have to reduce bid costs, especially for smaller projects. Partnerships New South Wales will ensure there will no longer be a dozen different portfolios, all with their own pet methodologies and documentation. This will reduce costs, enable greater standardisation of documentation and certainty in assessment procedures, and will value add by enabling projects to be packaged in innovative ways with the private sector, so we get more bang for the buck than we can ever achieve now in existing silos.
They are just some of the policy initiatives that a Liberal-Nationals government will implement to deliver economic development to this State and make it the powerhouse of the Australian economy once again, the powerhouse that it should be after March 2007. On another occasion I will inform the House of various other initiatives in relation to infrastructure. I commend these initiatives to the House.
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