News | 11 June

A Message from CCF National CEO, Chris Melham

I am pleased to report that CCF’s advocacy efforts to Government for an infrastructure led economic recovery were recognised at a meeting of Transport and Infrastructure Ministers held yesterday 5 June 2020.  

Ministers at Federal and State/Territory levels yesterday confirmed their support for an infrastructure led economic recovery. 

Ministers discussed their commitment to delivering their existing infrastructure pipelines including stimulus activities and ensuring sufficient resources are deployed to move projects through assessment processes and into construction faster by targeting administrative bottlenecks. Ministers further agreed to work together to harmonise and streamline processes to clear the way for an infrastructure-led recovery to Australia’s current economic condition including consideration of infrastructure bodies (iBodies) processes and environmental approvals.

CCF at both National and State/Territory levels have been actively lobbying government infrastructure ministers to adopt a civil infrastructure stimulus strategy to arrest Australia’s decline into recession. 

Prior to the meeting CCF wrote to TIC ministers urging them to adopt five key measures that are required to maximise the economic impact of governments’ infrastructure spend and to boost the productive capacity of the civil infrastructure sector. These measures are:

1.    Maximise capacity of the civil construction sector 
2.    Bring forward infrastructure spending
3.    Increase the level of infrastructure investment through the use of debt funding and the unspent monies from the $60 billion social infrastructure stimulus
4.    Disaggregation of large projects to allow greater interest from mid-tier contractors
5.    Streamlined Procurement Processes

Receiving support from Ministers for an infrastructure led recovery is great news for the civil construction sector and CCF National will continue to communicate with the Deputy Prime Minister in his capacity as Chair of TIC and his Department to ensure that the commitment is actioned as a matter of urgency.

Chris Melham
Chief Executive Officer
Civil Contractors Federation National 

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