SMART has prepared a Green Paper entitled “Infrastructure Imperatives for Australia”. The paper sets out aims a way forward for planning, provision and investment in the future infrastructure needs of Australia and addresses a number of key principles that successive governments have overlooked.
This Green Paper and the associated recommendations endeavour to capture the challenges and opportunities identified to ensure a better infrastructure future for our country. Continue reading
Garry Bowditch writes for The Conversation:
By Garry Bowditch
Australia spends more on infrastructure today than at any stage in its history. Yet governments are unable to meet demand and don’t expect ever to do so. What can governments do to keep up with escalating demand and community expectations for infrastructure?
Garry Bowditch writes for The Conversation:
Infrastructure is about the long-term growth and prosperity of a nation, but Australia will get very little of this benefit if the cost of building it continues to rapidly escalate.
Australia is becoming increasingly uncompetitive in design and delivery of major projects. This is an unacceptable situation, and a newly commissioned multi-state inquiry by the SMART Infrastructure Facility will identify the key causes and make recommendations to help secure better value for taxpayers’ money.
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Writing in the Australian Financial Review, Garry Bowditch says jurisdictions that can adapt quickly to innovation and technology benefit their communities greatly with new jobs, a better investment environment, great universities and more resilient futures.
One hundred and fifty years ago next month, multiple time zones were implemented for the first time anywhere in the world. Then, the US railway system – through the great logic of Sir Sandford Fleming and the sheer power of logistical demands – divided the continent into four different zones, east to west, so every 15 degrees of longitude equalled one hour of difference.
Fleming’s time zones solved a very practical problem: national timetables could be written for the great east-west train journeys from Chicago to San Francisco. The new railroads demanded legislative changes to create time zones that allowed the full benefit of new technology to operate with efficiency and enabled the US to operate as a single coherent economy for the first time. The rest of the story is “modern” history.
Infrastructure and technology are very powerful forces of change.
SMART Infrastructure Professorial Fellow Prof. Graham Harris writes in The Conversation:
If you listen to the debate between science and society in most of the West, you get one version or another of the linear model. Science comes first. When it is “settled”, society will know what to do. This is as true in the climate debate as it is in innovation. First comes the “breakthrough” and then the widget gets commercialised. Much of the economic development of the West has been driven by this “knowledge based” worldview.
It worked quite well when the problems were simple and the benefits easily captured – from steam engines to early antibiotics – but the world is changing. Now, the interaction between society, the economy and the environment is much more complex and recursive. Growth and development have changed the world and knowledge of that change is, in turn, changing our response. Knowledge and society interact.
SMART Infrastructure Professorial Fellow Prof. Graham Harris writes in The Conversation:
I sometimes wonder what planet this country of ours is on. The environmental debate we are having seems to be in a parallel universe to the rest of the world. Having spent the last four years running one of Europe’s biggest environmental research laboratories, the Lancaster Environment Centre, I find Australia strangely out of kilter.
All I hear here is apocalyptic gloom and doom: either the planet is done for if we don’t act, or the economy is done for if we do! We have a highly polarised debate and even more polarised reporting; with too much hand-wringing and head-banging but too little rational discussion or consultation about what actually to do. Doing nothing isn’t an option.
SMART Infrastructure Professorial Fellow Prof. Graham Harris writes in The Conversation:
The splendour of nature diminishes day by day despite the strenuous efforts of ecologists and all manner of scientific understandings and interventions. Biodiversity is in decline, and crucial resources become ever scarcer. Meanwhile the human population continues to rise, as do atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and long-term global temperatures.
Governments, corporations, and community groups all over the world invest in conservation and restoration programmes, but to depressingly little end. Obviously far more could be spent and far more could be done, but that would be no guarantee of success – not when our very approach to ecology is fundamentally flawed and wrong-headed.
SMART Infrastructure Professorial Fellow Prof. Graham Harris writes in The Conversation:
I’ve been away in the UK for a few years – and what do I find when I come back? In the Murray Darling we are still arguing over inputs (the amount of water to be returned to the river) instead of focusing on the state we actually want the river system to be in, and how to make it so.