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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Wednesday, 4 August 2004) . . Page.. 3411 ..

It marked the beginning of the pendulum being swung back towards a more balanced role for government investment in critical infrastructure.

He said that governments were responsible for providing infrastructure that benefited the whole community. Mr Jones went on to state:

I believe that the increased need for infrastructure investment will not go away. Tens of billions of dollars will be needed to address the backlog of work as well as meeting the changing needs caused by the ageing and growing population, and its move to new housing estates and to the coastal fringe.

I continue to quote from Mr Jones’s paper which states:

The only way this will be addressed is by increasing investment in infrastructure from both the public and the private sector.

He laments:

Unfortunately this will not occur quickly.

He said that governments had to take into account major policy shifts and that that did not necessarily happen at a very fast rate. Other people talked about how we are to meet the growing demand for new infrastructure. I think the ongoing maintenance of infrastructure was alluded to in a number of reports. Public-private partnerships refer to the need for new infrastructure but we have not necessarily dealt with how we maintain our current infrastructure and whether or not we can do that in a better way. Tim Cave, from the Victorian Department of Justice, talked about the complexity of public-private partnerships and stated:

The complexity arises in the commercial/financial terms of the transaction, in the service scope (depending on the mix of accommodation, core and ancillary services), in the numbers of parties involved in the transaction, and in the array of transaction documents.

He went on to state:

As a result, PPP delivery during the transition and development phases requires experienced project management and consultant advice.

That means that the PPP model works best. To a certain extent he was saying that it works only when one is looking at larger major projects, where the value derived from private sector participation is sufficient to offset additional transaction costs. So we are debating whether both the private and public sectors are receiving value for money and we are also debating the value of the end product. Mr Hargreaves referred in his speech to the need for ongoing accountability and control over public-private partnerships. When we look at public-private partnerships we are looking at a legal contract; we are not necessarily looking at a parliamentary policy decision.

A contract entered into by one government binds future parliaments for many years. There is little scope for movement if political or community imperatives change, whereas

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