In summary, the most important issues identified as barriers to competition were the:
• largely unknown pipeline of projects that is uncoordinated and sporadic in nature
• high establishment costs of developing a team with the core competencies and specialist knowledge required to participate competitively in PPP projects.
Should Governments be able to address sufficiently the Australian PPP pipeline issue, many other issues regularly cited as key barriers to competition (such as complexity of process, magnitude of bid costs, lack of co-ordination and sporadic nature of projects brought to market, etc) would have significantly less of an impact. By addressing the PPP pipeline issue, Governments would give the PPP market sufficient information and certainty to assess the opportunity and respond efficiently by either entering the market or growing existing teams to meet national capacity requirements, as well as the ability to recoup bid costs on future successful transactions.
Participants also raised a range of other issues, with the most common being the:
• the magnitude of bid costs and their uncertainty, resulting from protracted and uncertain procurement process timeframes
• a perceived lack of commitment to PPPs consistently across all Australian jurisdictions
• for international Participants, the general complexity of bidding processes in the Australian PPP marketplace when compared with those of other international jurisdictions
• the current restrictions on the availability of finance, including the current lack of activity within capital markets, due to the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis.