Research conducted by Infrastructure Partnerships Australia (IPA) in conjunction with wealth management firm Perpetual showed half of Australian infrastructure investors are looking outside of the country for infrastructure opportunities due to a lack of Australian projects.
“The report shows there’s a very high level of appetite and interest for investment into Australian infrastructure projects,” IPA chief executive Brendan Lyons told InvestorDaily.
“At the same time it’s very clear that investors don’t believe the market in Australia is going to have a suitable number of opportunities for them to bid and invest.”
Nonetheless, Mr Lyons said there was “an incredibly high degree of money” seeking infrastructure opportunities, which he suggested meant governments “could be doing a lot more in the immediate term to deploy good capital in to good projects”.
“The simple truth of infrastructure is we’re not doing more because governments at a state level are fiscally constrained versus what they need to do,” he said.
Mr Lyons also told InvestorDaily the recently launched Australia New Zealand Infrastructure Pipeline would work to support the number of opportunities available to infrastructure investors.
“The reason that Australia and New Zealand see a mutual benefit in this sort of program is because it is arm’s length from government,” he said.
“It means that we’re really giving a considered opinion of what is likely to happen and what is committed to happen, rather than the more traditional approach of governments publishing a list of projects that they want to do but are yet to find the money.”
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