Given these challenges, the public sector can play an important enabling role, either through use of its own balance sheet directly or through risk-sharing arrangements with the private sector. Over recent times, we have seen a number of innovative public-private partnerships that have helped build important pieces of infrastructure in Australia, although some of these have had problems.
More broadly, I suspect that one reason that the public sector has been a bit reluctant to play an even larger role is an aversion to public debt. In many important respects, this aversion to public debt has served Australia very well, but it has also limited the appetite to borrow to build public infrastructure.