Out of a total of 206 projects that were identified as being undertaken since 2000, and met the capex size criteria 50 were PPPs and 156 were Traditional procurement projects. The final sample was composed of:
• 21 PPP projects; and
• 33 Traditional projects.
These projects were located in New South Wales (19), Queensland (9) and Victoria (26), with projects grouped into Social (24), Transport (25), Water (3) and IT (4) infrastructure groups or sectors, creating a good balance of jurisdictions and sectors.
The availability of publicly available data was a limitation of this study. Rich data was obtained for the majority of completed PPP projects, but the availability of data for Traditional projects was limited. Frequently, approval information for Traditional projects was buried in sector or agency budgets and availability of information on time and cost at the various phases was limited. Select projects have been covered in detail by Auditor General reports. Both NSW and Victoria have started to release information on the value and timing of signed contracts, but as yet these databases are not sufficiently populated to cover the study period since 2000. For PPPs the NSW Government releases full contractual summaries, and the Victorian Government has been quite open in the level of details provided by way of media releases.
The projects detailed in Appendix C demonstrate the extent of transparency for PPPs and the lack of data, relative to the total number of projects, for the Traditional projects. In the course of our research we concluded that PPPs are far more transparent than Traditional projects. We believe that this lack of public data relating to Traditional projects may be at least partly responsible for the relative lack of a vigorous research program on the efficiency of Traditional procurement compared with the research program on PPPs.