PRIORITISE THE REGIONS

INFRASTRUCTURE Australia’s list of priority projects should be married to regional cities, the Business Council of Australia says.

Chief executive Jennifer Westacott said second cities should be identified and infrastructure spending prioritised based on long-term planning for their future.

“You have to make some visionary decisions about what you want places like Geelong to be and prioritise infrastructure accordingly,” Ms Westacott said.

She said the fight for funding with “everyone wanting a bit of this and a bit of that” meant cities could not build projects with sufficient scale.

“I would love to see Infrastructure Australia’s list of priority projects connected to the 20 or 30 most important regional centres across Australia,” she said.

Infrastructure Australia is an independent statutory body that can prioritise and progress nationally significant infrastructure but only one of its four Victorian projects — the Murray Basin rail project — is outside Melbourne.

In Geelong last week to take part in the Strong Australia series, Ms Westacott also called for a better approach to creating precincts in regional cities.

“We need to create precincts in our major cities and regions like here in Geelong so companies can become magnet companies,” she said.

While Geelong was moving in that direction, she said it should not be left to chance.

“We have really fallen behind, we are just not proactive in planning some of this,” she said. “You have to have purpose in companies and purpose in government.”

Ms Westacott said Geelong should be set for a “tsunami of activity” on the back of Avalon Airport becoming an international gateway next month.

Being an “agribusiness capital” and having an international airport 20 minutes away will be a catalyst to exporting value-added products into Asian markets.

“To realise it takes imagination and purpose, and governments getting out of the way, removing the red tape,” Ms Westacott said.

“There is tremendous opportunities here, the challenges are to get things to happen fast enough.”

The Geelong Strong Australia forum was the seventh in a series run by the Business Council of Australia, and supported by Sky News and News Corp.