Government

Building - and maintaining - a future

Sir Rod Eddington, Chair of Infrastructure Australia, talks to a Government Magazine roundtable about the infrastructure challenges facing NSW.

Most Western liberal democracies have a similar problem with infrastructure, a problem highlighted in the US a couple of years ago when a bridge collapsed. There is a lot of infrastructure that’s been built over a long period of time. And while we've built enough additional infrastructure to cope with a growing population, we haven’t actually set aside the money to cope with what we've already got.

Sydney is certainly an icon of our nation. It is one of the only cities I know where as you fly in people look out the window. They are looking at everything around them as they are so amazed at the beauty of the place. It makes other cities jealous, by reasons of its harbour and its Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. I was trying to work out before I got out of Finance how much we’d get for the Opera House if we had to pick up the debt. I had a paper ready to go, but I lost my job.