Reforms can align with different policy priorities

As the successful implementation of these recommendations depends on government action over a long time, recommendations have been assessed for their alignment to the explicit policy priorities of the Australian Government.

Infrastructure Australia's Statement of Expectations provides a useful reference point for understanding these priorities.15

As well as the community-weighted baseline assessment, we assessed recommendations against the stated Australian Government objectives that infrastructure:

• provides or underpins services that deliver economic and social benefits to Australians

• has an important role in shaping cities that are productive and liveable

• provides connectivity to regional and remote parts of Australia.

These have been translated into five policy priorities against which to assess the impact of recommendations, as shown in Table IV.4.

Table IV.4: How policy priorities translate from the Statement of Expectations

Policy priority		Description
	Economic benefits	Recommendations most likely to provide economic benefits to Australians, Including Increased national employment or GDP
	Social benefits	Recommendations most likely to Increase quality of life to Australians, Including Improved access for disadvantaged groups, health outcomes, affordability, and opportunities for education and employment
	Productive cities	Recommendations most likely to make cities more productive, through efficiency benefits, higher-quality workforce or greater services on demand Only recommendations relevant to Fast-growing Cities or Smaller Cities and Regional Centres are considered
	Liveable cities	Recommendations most likely to make cities more liveable, through addressing social, environmental and governance outcomes Only recommendations relevant to Fast-growing Cities or Smaller Cities and Regional Centres are considered
	Connected regions	Recommendations most likely to Increase connectivity and equality of outcomes between regions Recommendations that only Impact Fast-growing Cities are not considered

A multi-criteria analysis framework allows weighting adjustments to reflect different priorities. This has been applied to the five policy priorities. Adjusting weightings for priorities maintains the evidence-based impact assessments in the 33 criteria while increasing or decreasing the weighting of the impact according to what aligns with each policy priority.

We assessed the impact against each policy priority by re-weighting the 33 criteria to either:

• increase the weighting of criteria that support the priority (for example, 'improved access for disadvantaged groups' is strongly weighted under the 'social benefits' policy priority weighting profile); or

• de-weight or ignore criteria that are not relevant to it (for example, 'increases national employment or Gross Domestic Product' is ignored in the 'social benefits' policy priority weighting profile).

Changing the weightings still draws on the same evidence-based impact assessment scoring as the community-weighted baseline.

To determine performance against the policy priorities, the reforms were assessed against the same criteria with new weightings. This is explained in further detail in the 2021 Reform Priority List, and the results are reported in the Results and prioritisation chapter.

Table IV.5 explains how criteria have been re-weighted under each policy priority.

Table IV.5: Each policy priority emphasises specific criteria through weightings

Impact themes	Impact category			Impact criteria	Economic benefits	Social benefits			Productive cities	Liveable cities	Connected regions
Service users	Quality			1. Provides a fast service that Is easy to use						High	Low
				2. Services available with minimal disruption and variance In quality						High	High
				3. Enhanced safety and security for users		Low				High
	Access			4. Comparable services across all places		Low					Max
				5. Services on demand when users need them					High	High	Low
				6. Improved access for disadvantaged groups		Max
	Affordability			7. Pricing reflects usage and costs to deliver the service	Low				High
				8. Affordability for an average Australian household	Low	High				Low
				9. Costs distributed fairly based on users' ability to pay		High
Community sustainability	Economic			10. Improved efficiency	Low				Max
				11. Improved access to a higher-quality workforce	Low				High
				12. Increases national employment or GDP	Max				Low
	Environmental			13. Supports waste reduction and circular economy						Low
				14. Reduced harmful air and water pollution						High
				15. Reduced greenhouse gas emissions						Low
	Social			16. Opportunities for education and employment		High				High
				17. Reduced anti-social behaviour and crime		Low				High
				18. Improved health outcomes		High				High
	Governance			19. Improved planning and decision-making					Low
				20. Transparency of decision-making
				21. Consideration of the needs of local communities and businesses		High				Low	High
Ease of implementation		Costliness	22. Minimises upfront and ongoing costs		High
			23. Minimises financial burden on the taxpayer		Low
		Complexity	24. Minimises time to Implement
			25. Minimises complexity of Implementation
		Capacity	26. Capability of government to Implement		Low
			27. Capacity of Industry to deliver		Low
Risks to success		Acceptance	28. Community acceptance					Low
		Confidence	29. Expected Impacts are clear		Low
			30. Confidence that benefits will be achieved		Low
			31. Confidence that reform will be successful during COVID-19 recovery		High		High
			32.Quality and availability of supporting evidence
		Control	33. Extent of government control over success of reform

Note: Only the criteria that are most relevant for addressing the policy priority retains a weighting. The relevant weightings are then redistributed from the community priorities weightings, according to a tiered hierarchy of their relevance. In order of importance, the tiers are Max, High and Low, and the weightings by policy priority sum to 100%.