Roads Australia
Text of the opening address by ARF President, Ray Fisher, at the ARF National Roads Summit 2008, Sydney, June 17.
It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the 2008 ARF National Roads Summit.
We again have an outstanding program for you over the next two days.
I would first of all like to acknowledge the New South Wales Minister for Roads and a good friend of ARF, Eric Roosendaal, who will be addressing us shortly.
I would like to thank the sponsors of the summit, Shell Bitumen, Pitt & Sherry, the ARRB Group, Downer EDI Works and Tenix. The John Shaw Dinner tonight will be sponsored by the John Holland Group.
The theme of this year's conference is managing roads as a business. This requires us not simply to benchmark performance, but to understand the role which each element of the industry plays within a total system.
Never was this more important.
There is increasing public debate around the key issues of accessibility, industry capacity, sustainability and infrastructure delivery. These take us well beyond simple advocacy in terms of building more roads.
They are, in fact, symptomatic of a tidal shift in our national priorities. Within only the last six months, ministers have begun saying that the nation’s greatest challenge is not the need to enhance the national estate by building new infrastructure. Simply building new infrastructure was yesterday’s story. Australia is not about to be saved any time soon by building another Snowy River Scheme. Our greatest challenge as a nation – not just in roads - is congestion.
Managing it may be the nation’s single greatest expense for much of this century and it will fundamentally influence the nation’s productivity and living standards.
It is now estimated that congestion will cost the nation more than $20 billion by 2020 if we don't take action soon.
We have been talking about current means and processes of delivering new infrastructure for some time including constraints on resources, tendering costs and the need for a fully funded predictable pipeline of infrastructure projects.
In the meantime, the costs of transport, fuel and other key resources have escalated significantly, putting at risk our ability to fund the projects as originally envisaged.
By next month the cost of steel will have increased by almost 50% in the last 12 months.
Some are forecasting the price of oil at around $200 a barrel within the next 12 months and this, combined with increases in food prices, has serious political implications.
The good news is that there seems to finally be a consensus developing at the political level and a sense of urgency is in the air. Minister Albanese recently acknowledged that “Time is Money”.
The development of Infrastructure Australia and a new national transport plan in the making, together with recent COAG meetings, are evidence of a new will to deliver.
What difference will it make to us?
An immense difference. The ground is shifting. Our priorities will not be building ribbons of duplicated freeways, but solving extraordinary problems in urban areas. This will impose more integration and complexity on our industry than we have ever dreamed. Our major projects will need to co-ordinate traffic technology, tunneling, complex interchanges and staggering dollar investments. All this with an overlay of community consultation, and environmental awareness that would cause old style road builders to shake their heads in disbelief.
ARF is well placed to deliver in this complex environment. The ARF is unique as an association in that it embraces the entire road sector and within the context of the whole economy. Its membership is drawn from industry associations, major companies and government agencies as equal members. We reflect the new integrated approach which will determine the commercial success of our individual members.
Tomorrow we will change our name to Roads Australia. The new name not only confirms we are a national peak body but affirms that we have a vision and an integrated membership.
We are currently establishing specific policy chapters in parallel with the policy areas of the new national transport plan. We have already had positive discussions with ministers and with the NTC about a collaborative policy effort.
We are not interested in advocacy and lobbying. We want to be partners in the policy process itself. Everyone will benefit from this approach and it is great to see the new government understands this.
There has been a lot of progress made around the world in tackling the issues of congestion and the implications of climate change and scarcity of resources. We have a number of international speakers who will bring us up-to-date with overseas developments.
Who better to set the scene than our keynote speaker, Nazir Alli, Chief Executive of the South African National Roads Agency.
There is no need to reinvent the wheel but rather to take the best and to learn from what has been done elsewhere, modify it to suit our particular needs. It is time for action and Time is Money.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the ARF National Roads Summit. It is certainly not Australia’s umpteenth infrastructure conference. This conference is NOT about infrastructure for infrastructure’s sake. We live in a far more complicated world. I am not the first to say it, but when this Summit is over I am sure you will remember that you heard the new message here.
Submitted by Mark Bowmer on Friday June 20th 2008 4:31pm