As many of my readers already know, I am a passionate advocate of more and better infrastructure for Australia, striving persistently to promote an increase of meaningful investment in it, rather than the wasteful pork-barreling of poorly-researched projects that politicians love, but which have no relevance to any master plan for the development of the nation.
Years of frustrating negotiations with politicians and bureaucrats in three levels of government have revealed how they spend most of their time fighting one another at political and bureaucratic levels over what should or should not be implemented. When they do come to a decision, they then spend even more time searching for plausible reasons to slow it up so as to delay the spending of committed capital and ensure they have funds available to buy votes through election handouts.
These experiences have given me time to understand a very strategic fact that politicians deliberately ignore that physical infrastructure has value only if it is implemented in close association with appropriate social infrastructure that will enable the nation to gain maximum benefit from it. Continue reading “It’s time to change the face of Australia and marry social and physical infrastructure”