Identifying which reforms best deliver on community priorities

To understand how the Australian community prioritise costs, risks and benefits of infrastructure, we conducted a 2,000-member community survey conducted in June 2020.14 We asked individuals and businesses to rank and rate the importance of four impact themes (service user impacts, community sustainability impacts, ease of implementation and risk), as well as a long list of impact criteria that were relevant to them (service user and community sustainability impacts). We used these results to inform which criteria were most important to the community, resulting in the 33 impact criteria shown in Table IV.1.

These survey results also helped us to understand the relative importance of each criterion relative to each other. We used the average of the importance ratings (out of 5) to produce weightings for each criterion, adding to a total of 100%. By using this to produce aggregate scores for each reform, we were able to determine which reforms have the greatest impact on the balance of community priorities.

We found that the community placed high importance on most criteria, which meant that most criteria contributed equally to the total. In summary, for assessing reforms against community priorities, we used these community priorities weightings:

•  service user impacts: 25.6%

•  community sustainability impacts: 25.6%

•  ease of implementation: 23.8%

•  risks to success: 25.0%

The 6 ease of implementation and 6 risk criteria were equally weighted within their impact theme, while we used the survey results to set the weightings of the 21 service user and community sustainability criteria.