16. Australia needs integrated infrastructure and land-use planning, across all levels of government. Progress has been slow in securing the efficiency and service delivery benefits of strategic decision making.
17. Sound infrastructure planning requires an ongoing commitment to engage communities throughout the decision-making process. This improves the likelihood of meeting community needs and expectations, and reduces objections to development.
18. Improvements in long-term infrastructure planning, project appraisal and project selection (including the consistent use and transparent reporting of cost-benefit analyses) are necessary if Australians' expectations are to be realised.
19. Long-term planning necessarily involves dealing with uncertainty, with current issues including:
a. the implications of demographic change for Australian society generally and government finances in particular;
b. the scope and direction of technological change;
c. changes in the global economy;
d. the future of work, e.g. where people work, incomes, and part-time work; and
e. the prospect of climate change, and uncertainty as to how the international community will respond.
20. There is a need for more detailed information on infrastructure performance to be assembled consistently, at a national level, and for this information to be reported publicly to assist the forecasting of benefits and costs when planning infrastructure.
21. An improved framework is required to protect corridors for transport and other linear infrastructure. The failure to protect corridors can lead to significantly higher construction costs, making otherwise beneficial projects uneconomic.
22. Post-completion reviews are not regularly undertaken for infrastructure projects, limiting the opportunities for governments and others to learn from mistakes and successes. This is to the detriment of current and future decision-making processes.
23. Ineffective and inconsistent regulation has had adverse outcomes for infrastructure users and the Australian community. These include high costs in parts of the electricity sector, poor pricing decisions leading to potential problems in the future in the water sector, and poor levels of cost-recovery in the transport sector. Greater independence of regulatory oversight would improve the quality of decision making.
24. Environmental considerations should form a fundamental aspect of infrastructure project selection and planning processes.
25. More rigorous and transparent strategic planning offers the potential to minimise project level disputes about the environmental merits and impacts of specific projects.