In the interview, Peter talked through the challenges facing Australian developers, project owners and procurement professionals. He looks at why Australia’s road investment is unlikely to return to  the scale of past mega projects, the moral obligation infrastructure procurement teams have to communities affected by major works and the shift towards delivery  partner and ECI models.

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Global sentiment appears to be shifting towards roads and airports over rail and seaports. Does that track with what you’re seeing?

Broadly yes, on roads, but the character of road investment is changing. I don’t think we’ll see projects at the scale of WestConnex or North East Link in Australia over the next decade.

Rail activity is happening to bolster legacy projects like the Olympics, but it’s more precinct development and local connectivity than the grand suburban rail-loop style projects. The honest read is that it’s less about one mode dominating another and more about investment becoming more directly linked to a specific need case – the Olympics, high-speed connectivity – rather than just infrastructure catch-up, which really characterised the past decade.

Progress monitoring and reporting is the infrastructure procurement area most in need of improvement, according to our survey respondents. Why do you think that’s a pain point?

It’s less about the tactical mechanics of monitoring and more about drift. The question is whether decision makers are getting early insight into the project’s direction of travel, where a project’s trajectory is heading on time and cost, and being able to act on it.

The cancellation of the Queensland leg of Inland Rail in May 2026 is a useful example. When you look at the delays associated with landholder access and consultation arrangements, what you see is a project that drifted without correction. Things are taking too long to move from business case to contract execution to delivery and that middle phase needs to be tightened.

The underlying issue isn’t that people don’t know how to report, it’s that reporting isn’t being used decisively enough to pull projects back into line.

The market’s perception of infrastructure procurement efficiency has improved significantly. What do you think is behind that shift?

Practice makes perfect, but it’s more than just repetition. Australia has undertaken some extraordinary procurements over the last decade, and the people running major projects today are drawing on genuine hard won experience of what can go wrong.

There’s also a cohort dimension worth noting. When we came out of the global financial crisis, a lot of very senior and experienced capacity left the industry, creating a generational chasm where projects that should have been run by people with over 30 years’ experience were being run by people with 15 or 20 years’ experience. Not only was experience lost but the next generation lost access to their mentors.

We’re now a decade on from that, and the people at the helm today have learned enormously from that period. One practical marker is the level of field investigation we do now is 10 times what we did 10 years ago. That goes directly to efficiency, it reduces unknown risks and gives the market something it can actually price with confidence.

Community engagement has emerged as a top area of infrastructure procurement needing improvement. What does getting it right actually look like?

An infrastructure project is immensely disruptive, the construction is big, noisy, often 24/7. For communities experiencing that, there is a fundamental need for a clear, honest understanding of what the project entails, what it means for them in real terms, what the mitigations are and when it’s going to end. There’s a subset of this conversation which is particularly challenging – land acquisition.

The social licence needed around this is something else entirely. It demands you recognise this is something deeply personal, it’s somebody’s home, their land, their lived experience, and something you must absolutely engage respectfully around. Energy transition projects have encountered this acutely, and high-speed rail will face the same thing.

There is a moral obligation to treat communities with honesty and transparency about what’s happening and when it will stop.

ESG considerations have fallen sharply over the past year, both as a standalone factor in risk allocation and in how far they’re integrated into the infrastructure procurement process overall. Does that align with what you’re seeing?

At the risk of two contradictory statements, both of which I think are true, ESG is far more embedded as part of the standard procurement process than it was. The consideration of environment, sustainability and governance is less a standalone initiative now and more just what projects do, to greater or lesser degrees. It’s less prominent because you’re not shining a spotlight on it in the same way.

At the same time, there is a rising tide that gives me some pause. There is rhetoric emerging about whether we’re overpaying for projects because of ESG, the language of red tape and cost blowout. I’m not seeing it translate into execution yet, but it’s in the ether, and if we don’t keep pushing forward on sustainability, there’s a real risk of some quite negative outcomes. The question is how you value cost and what you include in the cost matrix.

Some of the current rhetoric is trying to squeeze that cost bucket, and some of it may be a necessary correction – greenwashing has been a thing but there is a risk of overcorrection leading to poor outcomes. That said, it’s a classic case of the Overton window moving. If you stand still for long enough, it swings back.

What infrastructure procurement innovation or emerging practice do you think has the greatest potential to improve project outcomes over the coming years?

I see the two themes as somewhat linked. First, we’re seeing major procuring agencies move toward delivery partner and capability partner models, engaging with industry much earlier in the development cycle, with a stronger focus on constructability, programme, and early and enabling works logistics.

The allied version of that is early contractor involvement (ECI) and we’re seeing a lot more of it. Both represent a fundamental shift in the conversation. The traditional model was simple. Here are my requirements, go away and bid against them. We then went through a period of requirements-based bidding with more interaction. This presents a different experience, but it’s still fundamentally the same structure.

What delivery partner and ECI models do is challenge the requirement itself. It’s less about responding to a client’s stated brief and more about asking whether that brief is actually right. That requires a level of maturity in procuring agencies that is a step up from where things have been. It’s about applying a deep understanding of the commercial, technical, environmental and community stakeholder dimensions that shape whether a requirement holds up in reality.

That’s where I see the genuine shift in behaviour that can drive better outcomes.

The full report can be downloaded through Ansarada. 2027 Transport Infrastructure Outlook Report FINAL.pdf