Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will just make the quick point that the amendments that Senator Whish-Wilson is referring to have been dealt with. The amendment before the chair at the moment deals with bilateral agreements, not cost-benefit studies. But the senator pointed to the needs of the private sector, and those needs and patterns in private sector finance for infrastructure are front and centre of the government's mind in proposing this. On the advice that I am provided with, infrastructure finance has become increasingly difficult in this country. Before the global financial crisis, the average maturity of debt to infrastructure projects was 11 years. At the moment, it has dropped back to six years, I believe, from the advice I have been provided with. For an infrastructure project of a long life—typically over decades, not years in single digits—that makes the risk of investing in projects with such a short rollover period quite high. That is one of the factors that has led the government to land, if you like, on this design that would provide some level of concessionality to the private sector both in terms of rates and, perhaps more importantly, in terms of the maturity and length of time that proponents of projects would have to make a buck and be able to put themselves in a cash-flow position to pay back their financiers.

On the senator's particular concerns about transparency here for the private sector on project selection: this particular facility is a different situation than Infrastructure Australia itself. We are seeking to partner with the private sector on individual projects that often they may put forward themselves or be involved in directly. We fully expect that the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility will work in close consultation with those proponents. Transparency is a two-way street, so we fully expect that those private sector proponents will provide sufficient detail for the board to make an informed judgement of the commerciality or otherwise of their projects. Indeed, there are requirements in the draft mandate for financial modelling and other analysis to be provided to the board by those proponents so they can make that decision. We believe that, in the confines of some matters being commercial-in-confidence, there will be the level of transparency between the board and the proponents that will allow informed decision making and the right projects to be selected.