Author Archives: Travis Holland

Australia’s Infrastructure Cost Conundrum

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Garry Bowditch writes for The Conversation:

Infrastructure is about the long-term growth and prosperity of a nation, but Australia will get very little of this benefit if the cost of building it continues to rapidly escalate.

Australia is becoming increasingly uncompetitive in design and delivery of major projects. This is an unacceptable situation, and a newly commissioned multi-state inquiry by the SMART Infrastructure Facility will identify the key causes and make recommendations to help secure better value for taxpayers’ money.
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Driverless cars light the road to Sydney’s future

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Writing in the Australian Financial Review, Garry Bowditch says jurisdictions that can adapt quickly to innovation and technology benefit their communities greatly with new jobs, a better investment environment, great universities and more resilient futures.

One hundred and fifty years ago next month, multiple time zones were implemented for the first time anywhere in the world. Then, the US railway system – through the great logic of Sir Sandford Fleming and the sheer power of logistical demands – divided the continent into four different zones, east to west, so every 15 degrees of longitude equalled one hour of difference.

Fleming’s time zones solved a very practical problem: national timetables could be written for the great east-west train journeys from Chicago to San Francisco. The new railroads demanded legislative changes to create time zones that allowed the full benefit of new technology to operate with efficiency and enabled the US to operate as a single coherent economy for the first time. The rest of the story is “modern” history.

Infrastructure and technology are very powerful forces of change.

Read the full article here.

Don’t wait for science to ‘settle’; decide what society needs

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SMART Infrastructure Professorial Fellow Prof. Graham Harris writes in The Conversation:

If you listen to the debate between science and society in most of the West, you get one version or another of the linear model. Science comes first. When it is “settled”, society will know what to do. This is as true in the climate debate as it is in innovation. First comes the “breakthrough” and then the widget gets commercialised. Much of the economic development of the West has been driven by this “knowledge based” worldview.

It worked quite well when the problems were simple and the benefits easily captured – from steam engines to early antibiotics – but the world is changing. Now, the interaction between society, the economy and the environment is much more complex and recursive. Growth and development have changed the world and knowledge of that change is, in turn, changing our response. Knowledge and society interact.

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High performance railway organisations

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By Andrew McCusker, Director of Rail Logistics, and Dr Mark Ho.

Effective rail systems have major societal and economic impacts on Australia’s competitiveness, liveability and infrastructure resilience. There is a pressing need to enhance the rail transport system to become a viable and sustainable transport option in both cities and regional areas.

As railways are predominantly technical systems of delivery for passenger and freight services an attribute of a successful railway company is the ability to develop effective processes and clear communication to achieve high performance for customers. This is where engineers can differentiate themselves to deliver improved culture and organisational excellence. Continue reading →

How to make Australian cities the next resources bonanza

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By Garry Bowditch, CEO, SMART Infrastructure.

Australia must prepare now for a world in the Asian century that is nothing like what we have experienced in the past.

The engine of growth for the world economy will be driven by consequences of migration from agricultural to urban living across the Asia Pacific. Hyper dense cities exceeding 10 million people will be the norm for countries throughout Asia. The sheer intensity of these metropolises will see by 2050 over 75% of humanity living in cities but occupying only a fraction, about 4 per cent in fact, of the earth’s surface.

There is an urgency to ensure our major cities grow and prosper for everyone’s benefit. If we succeed, we will underwrite the next economic super cycle reflecting a surge in productivity and exports of high value Australian goods and services throughout Asia and the Pacific. Continue reading →

Apocalypse Not: doomsday thinkers of Oz should get out more

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SMART Infrastructure Professorial Fellow Prof. Graham Harris writes in The Conversation:

I sometimes wonder what planet this country of ours is on. The environmental debate we are having seems to be in a parallel universe to the rest of the world. Having spent the last four years running one of Europe’s biggest environmental research laboratories, the Lancaster Environment Centre, I find Australia strangely out of kilter.

All I hear here is apocalyptic gloom and doom: either the planet is done for if we don’t act, or the economy is done for if we do! We have a highly polarised debate and even more polarised reporting; with too much hand-wringing and head-banging but too little rational discussion or consultation about what actually to do. Doing nothing isn’t an option.

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Ecology is failing and needs to be freed from our limitations

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SMART Infrastructure Professorial Fellow Prof. Graham Harris writes in The Conversation:

The splendour of nature diminishes day by day despite the strenuous efforts of ecologists and all manner of scientific understandings and interventions. Biodiversity is in decline, and crucial resources become ever scarcer. Meanwhile the human population continues to rise, as do atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and long-term global temperatures.

Governments, corporations, and community groups all over the world invest in conservation and restoration programmes, but to depressingly little end. Obviously far more could be spent and far more could be done, but that would be no guarantee of success – not when our very approach to ecology is fundamentally flawed and wrong-headed.

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Big issues for energy infrastructure

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By Les Hosking, Honorary Professorial Fellow. 

Reliable, secure and low cost energy has been one of the cornerstones of Australia’s economic success. In an electricity and gas context, reliability means a low interruption risk, security means continuity of availability relative to demand and sustainability means meeting present needs without compromising future generations to meet their needs.

A significant, diverse supply of approximately 800 years of brown coal and 300 years of black coal, large natural and coal seam gas resources plus wind, hydro, solar and geothermal have so far contributed to Australia having very low cost commercial, industrial and residential electricity and gas prices. Continue reading →

Science’s stagnant thinking: our rivers need a revolution

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SMART Infrastructure Professorial Fellow Prof. Graham Harris writes in The Conversation:

I’ve been away in the UK for a few years – and what do I find when I come back? In the Murray Darling we are still arguing over inputs (the amount of water to be returned to the river) instead of focusing on the state we actually want the river system to be in, and how to make it so.

Read the full article.