Stop disaster zone developments: Infrastructure Australia chairman Col Murray

The nation’s infrastructure will face critical risks from climate change, the Infrastructure Australia chairman says, calling for an overhaul of land planning.

Infrastructure Australia chairman Col Murray at Streay Bay on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. Picture: Andrew Brooks

Development in areas prone to flooding and bushfires should be halted, says the chair of Infrastructure Australia, who is calling for an overhaul of land planning to confront the rising threat of natural disasters.

In his first interview since starting his role in December, Col Murray told The Australian the nation’s infrastructure would face critical risks from climate change, and it would take several decades to build resilience to its effects.

“We can’t have further development on flood plains,” Mr Murray said, questioning if the inundated NSW city of Lismore “was built in the right place”. “We can’t allow further development in high-risk bushfire-prone areas. There’s a planning responsibility that, somehow, we need the whole community to be involved in arriving at that solution.

“We talk about that magical ‘one in 100 year’ flood-planning level; well clearly that level is not the right level we need to be working with in the future.

“What is the right level in different areas? They are the sort of things we need to do.”

Mr Murray was speaking from Streaky Bay, on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, where he was staying in a caravan with his wife, Carol, on what they hope will be a year-long driving holiday around the country.

While the trip provides an ­opportunity to do a one-man ­infrastructure audit, in truth it’s realising the couple’s 30-year dream “to stop and smell the roses, and fill in the gaps” by visiting places they could not get to when constrained by time.

A former mayor of Tamworth Regional Council in northern NSW, Mr Murray said the role “probably wasn’t first up a natural fit for what I had hoped to get out of life for the next few years”, but he was excited about the prospect of leading a board that was drawn mainly from outside the capitals.

“The lantern’s been shone on the regions over the past three or four years and that’s what particularly attracts me (to the role),” he said. “I have a very clear sense of the capacity of the regions and what I’d like to try to see happen is to unlock the potential for our ­nation of the regions.”

Ahead of the March 29 budget, in which the Morrison government is expected to splash out on regional infrastructure projects, Mr Murray also spoke about emerging gaps in skills and industry capacity, as well as the potential of the regions.

On Thursday, IA is releasing the Regional Strengths and Infrastructure Gaps report to support the “regional renaissance” that has occurred as a result of large population shifts due to Covid’s affect on migration trends.

The report provides a state of play for the needs of 48 regions, with the five most common priorities being: availability, diversity and affordability of housing; water security; mobile and broadband connectivity; access to further education and skills training; and connectivity through transport networks.

The report also outlines the specific strengths and community aspirations for growth, which IA hopes will guide further planning and investment.

Mr Murray said building resilience into infrastructure networks was a shared responsibility of all governments, communities, developers, and the insurance industry given more frequent floods and bushfires.

“These extraordinary events are with us, they’re here, and we’ll have to address it,” he said.

“Doing the same things over and over again (won’t work). We’ve got to actually instigate some of those reforms and work out what we need to do.

“And the burning question that is on a lot of people’s lips is, ‘Is a city like Lismore built in the right place?’ We can’t ignore that question. Is the solution infrastructure? Do we build a bigger bank? What do we do? That’s where the planning comes in.”

The IA chair is from the New England electorate of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional ­Development Minister Barnaby Joyce, and has described himself as a “fairly solid Barnaby supporter”. His appointment was strongly criticised by Anthony Albanese, who has said he will review from top to bottom IA’s purpose and performance if Labor wins the election.

“I am disappointed that the current government has allowed Infrastructure Australia to drift in recent years and that it just recently stacked the board with ­political appointees with questionable credentials,” the Opposition Leader said last week.

He also said the Morrison government had used scarce infrastructure funds to shore up Coalition seats.

Mr Murray said the federal advisory body had deep expertise and an unmatched database and was open to seeing it evolve to achieve better outcomes for taxpayers and the sector.

IA chief executive Romilly Madew said resilience needed to be incorporated at the planning stage for new or refurbished infrastructure. “If it’s not embedded right up front then it’s just not happening, and we’ve seen that,” Ms Madew said.

“As the Insurance Council of Australia has said, 97 per cent of funds are used for clean up, and only 3 per cent on prevention.

“We should be spending more in the planning phase on prevention,” she added.

Although prevention sits outside IA’s remit, Mr Murray said its expertise and industry links could come into play in the future.

Mr Murray said there was “no simple solution” to mitigating the risks to places and infrastructure from climate change, but added: “We’ve got to plan our nation better. It will take us decades and decades to get to where we need to be with a solution.

“There’s no government anywhere that’s going to be able to apply a budget that’s going to be able to satisfy the needs of these responses into the future, but we’ve got to be able to take the first steps on the journey.

“We just can’t keep doing what we’ve done after every other bushfire or after every other flood,” he said.

“We’ve got to change things, and that will be the confronting part for many, many people in many different sectors.”