Transport and Infrastructure -  Major Publications

Assured property rights are crucial to promoting increased wealth. Open competition and private ownership gives firms considerable incentives to discover and meet demands at lowest cost. Australian network businesses prior to National Competition Policy were usually protected from competition and were mainly government-owned.

This volume has sprung from concerns about the Access Provisions (Part IIIA) of the Trade Practices Act. It comprises two pieces of research, which analyse these provisions from a legal and an economic perspective. Part IIIA of the Trade Practices Act resulted from a perception in the 1990’s that the Trade Practices Act was not capable of dealing effectively with competition where a single firm was in a dominant position.

Compared to public transport, people find cars to be more convenient and lower cost .... When US journalist Lincoln Steffens returned from Russia in 1921, he famously declared ‘I have seen the future and it works’. As we now know, the future that did actually work was not the socialism he admired but free enterprise and consumer sovereignty.

Once meaningful competition is in place, it is generally agreed that regulation should be removed. Determining the nature of meaningful competition has been a contentious issue in the gas supply industry but regulatory appeal body decisions and reports by the Productivity Commission have brought clarification.

The issue of infrastructure needs and reliability can be addressed in two ways. The first is to estimate how the market is developing; what sort of new investments are being made; how do consumers value different grades of reliability; where prices and generator reliability trends are heading; the likely location of new gas discoveries and the competitive environment for Australian gas here and overseas; the issues surrounding wind and other forms of generation; peak versus off peak.

The key issue in privatising infrastructure, and arguably the reason for it to be in public ownership, is the concern about natural monopoly. A monopolist is able to extract high prices by reducing availability of supply or access. This concern about “price gouging” and wasted supply is of long standing.