Developing Northern Australia Conference hears NAIF policy aspirations
A public lender once criticised for not being able to “get up a pie shop” has shared hopes of becoming a policy influencer from the lessons learnt over a decade of investment.
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Public lender Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility has hopes of becoming a policy influencer from lessons learnt over a decade of investment, a national conference has heard.
The public lender was an early focus at day one of the Developing Northern Australia Conference in Cairns on Tuesday, which attracted more than 500 attendees.
The concessional loan supplier with a lending capacity of $7bn has committed $4.3bn to 32 projects since its inception 2016, which in North Queensland equated to $1.3bn invested for 10 projects.
Retiring NAIF chief executive Craig Doyle, who is based in Cairns with about 30 other staff, accepted the organisation suffered heavy criticism in its early days, noting it took “a while to get the mandate right”.
“The last four or five years we’ve really started to see some traction,” he said.
“One of the big things that was a criticism of NAIF was ‘too slow to get the money out the door’.
“For the last two or three years, we’re averaging nearly $550m to $600m of money out the door.”
Mr Doyle said in the past 12 months four loans had been repaid and earned about $350m from principal and interest.
But the former Wilmar Sugar manager and Mackay Regional Council chief executive said after almost a decade in critiquing and assessing projects, NAIF could be in a position to start providing policy direction on infrastructure investment in northern Australia.
“We’ve had about 130 projects reach due diligence in the last seven or eight years … and we learn a lot about those projects,” he said.
“We learn about the business case, the modelling, the off take, the construction costs, the technical risks. So we’re now building a very strong mount of information about what it takes to get projects to be successful. We’ve also got some learnings on the way of what not to do.
“We don’t want to write the policy, but we do have some very good information on the investment side that probably no one else has had across wide sector diversification in northern Australia.”
Opposition Northern Australia spokeswoman Susan McDonald blasted the major banks for “postcode shading” in the north before doubling down on the Coalition’s pre-election wish of permanently instating NAIF funding to continue beyond its sunset clause of June 30, 2026.
While Northern Australia Minister Madeleine King didn’t announce an extension of NAIF, she said her government’s focus on national productivity recognised the importance of NAIF.
Day two of the conference will feature Northern Australia Universities Alliance chair Professor Scott Bowman who said he would be speaking about the importance of tertiary educators to not only be able to train local talent, but also be an attractive option to draw in students – noting the federal government’s cutback of international students last year was an example of bad “one-size-fits-all” policy.
The Cooperative Research Centre for Developing Northern Australia chief executive Anthony Curro is set to host a workshop explaining the organisation’s work on mapping Cape York water allocations, while overlaying that with governance structures to identify economic opportunities.
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Originally published as Developing Northern Australia Conference hears NAIF policy aspirations
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