Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Infrastructure Australia Amendment (Independent Review) Bill 2023. This bill seeks to amend the Infrastructure Australia Act to implement a number of recommendations from the independent review into Infrastructure Australia undertaken in 2022, which was a Labor election commitment. Labor did commit to a review of Infrastructure Australia because, under the former government, the organisation suffered from a series of political board appointments and a lack of direction. I think it's important for people to hear this. We know about it in here but the more Australians to hear about it, the better.

Major recommendations from the review that this bill will implement are: introducing a new object to the Infrastructure Australia Act 2008 that identifies IA's mandate as the Commonwealth government's independent advisor on nationally significant infrastructure investment planning and project prioritisation; and reforming IA's functions and product suite to be more focused, including developing a smaller, more targeted, infrastructure priority list that prioritises nationally significant infrastructure proposals for consideration by the Australian government.

The bill will help to reduce duplication with the states and territories by requiring IA to develop a nationally consistent framework for evaluating infrastructure proposals enabling IA to endorse project evaluations conducted by state and territory governments. The bill also makes changes to the governance arrangements of IA. Instead of a board, which we saw with the previous government, IA will be governed by three commissioners, including a chief commissioner and a chief executive officer, the CEO.