The 2021 Plan provides a reform pathway for responding to the 180 infrastructure challenges and opportunities identified in Infrastructure Australia's 2019 Audit.
It also responds to the additional infrastructure impacts of the pandemic, including the six challenges and six opportunities identified in our December 2020 Infrastructure beyond COVID-19 report, which preceded this Plan.1
Each recommended reform prioritises community and user outcomes, balanced against costs and risks in implementation.
To ensure our advice is practical and actionable across government and industry, we have clearly identified who is best-placed to implement each reform and own the interim outcomes and enabling activities.
The COVID-19 pandemic and its continuing impacts have demonstrated how rapidly assumptions of what the future could look like can shift. At the same time, infrastructure is long-lived, so it must be planned, built and managed in a way that will continue to service communities under a range of likely future scenarios.
To take account of uncertainty, we tested the reforms against a range of future scenarios. They included:
• speed of recovery from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic
• adoption of technological change
• the role of an emerging regionalised Australia and how cities will adapt
• a destabilised world.
To develop the recommendations, we also examined progress against the 78 recommendations made in the 2016 Australian Infrastructure Plan.
A summary of this review is available in the Progress since the 2016 Australian Infrastructure Plan,2 which we commissioned from EY. While there has been significant progress, we have also identified unfinished reform and incorporated it into the new reform agenda in the 2021 Plan.