Inflation shadow falls over privatised infrastructure model

The Australian Financial Review Infrastructure Summit heard on Monday that the pipeline of major projects that added to inflationary pressures in the economy is now drying up. New projects in areas such as housing and the renewable energy transition are unlikely to be shovel-ready in time to replenish it.

The glass-half-full perspective might be that the tapering of the infrastructure boom will help to bring down Australia’s sticky rate of inflation. Yet the long political tail of the inflation outbreak is casting a worrying shadow over the privatisation and asset recycling model used by governments in all mainland states (bar Queensland) over the past decade, which helped fill the pipeline and stoke the boom.