Whether it’s Labor working to get transmission lines and offshore wind up and running or the Coalition working to create a nuclear industry from scratch, it will take a strong government with the capacity to articulate a plan, and the legal, financial and human resources to make it a reality.
All of these requirements were met when we constructed the Snowy Mountains Scheme, a decades-long federal government initiative undertaken in cooperation with Victoria and NSW.
Are they still in place? Not yet. Government capacity to act has been eroded over decades of neoliberalism. Particularly at the national level, public service expertise has been hollowed out and replaced by reliance on private consulting firms.
To rebuild the federal government’s capacity to act will require recreating the public service as a career which attracts the best and brightest graduates – many of whom currently end up in the financial sector.