Infrastructure Australia puts Australia’s five-year major public infrastructure pipeline at a record $242 billion, up $29 billion in a year. The scale is enormous. But Massimo Franceschi, chief operating officer, Webuild Australia, holds the central voice in the account of how to spend it: he asks how to extract the greatest value from each dollar invested.
The pipeline could improve transport, accelerate the energy transition, strengthen water security, and build skills and supply chains. Those are its promised public benefits. The article’s proposed route to them, though, centres on productivity, project delivery and decisions made by clients, contractors and suppliers. It offers no direct testimony from communities affected by construction, and describes no grassroots organizing, mutual aid or direct action. Institutional and industry figures get the seats in this discussion.
The cost of the productivity gap
Construction labour productivity grew 17 per cent between 1994-95 and 2023-24. Across market-sector industries, it grew 64 per cent; in manufacturing, 58 per cent. Oxford Economics estimates stagnant construction productivity costs Australia $62 billion in lost work each year. Those figures make productivity a central concern, but the account doesn’t say who bears that estimated cost or how it’s distributed.
Franceschi warns against treating international project costs as a simple scoreboard. Comparisons, he says, depend on geology, labour markets, standards, project scope, regulation and community expectations. Copenhagen’s M4 metro extension delivered five stations and 5.7 kilometres of tunnel over almost six years for about $1.9 billion. Melbourne’s Metro Tunnel delivered five stations and twin nine-kilometre tunnels at a project cost of $13.48 billion. Neither project is a Webuild project. The article says differences in scope, geology, labour markets, regulatory requirements, design standards and included works mean direct comparisons require caution.
Who sets the terms of delivery
Franceschi proposes four approaches: standardise repeatable assets, resolve constructability issues early, allocate risk to the parties best able to manage it, and transfer capability between projects and jurisdictions. Standardised designs and components for stations, substations and viaducts, he says, can reduce interfaces, support more efficient manufacturing, and give suppliers greater confidence to invest. Incremental improvements across a pipeline of this scale could create considerable value. Contractors and suppliers can carry knowledge, systems and investment from one project to another.
Early industry involvement in design can address engineering, sequencing, logistics and supply-chain issues while options remain open and changes cost less. Collaborative contracting, Franceschi says, can improve transparency and certainty for clients and contractors. The proposed test for risk is practical: assign it to the parties with the knowledge, authority and capability to control it. Aligning standards and requirements between jurisdictions could also let skills, systems, technologies and proven solutions travel across programs.
Digital engineering, modern construction methods and more efficient manufacturing are presented as ways to improve planning and delivery. Procurement, the article says, can encourage proven innovation instead of requiring the industry to reinvent its approach for each project. That puts the terms of improvement in procurement and project design, where institutional clients and industry participants make decisions.
A workforce shortage, not just a bigger pipeline
Infrastructure Australia estimates public infrastructure projects face a shortage of 141,000 workers, potentially rising to more than 300,000 by mid-2027. Franceschi says the industry can’t rely solely on adding people; it must make better use of existing capability. His account says local contractors bring knowledge of Australian communities, conditions, supply chains and regulation, while international contractors bring experience from different markets and technical environments. Combining those capabilities while developing local skills, suppliers and partnerships, he says, can expand industry capacity rather than substitute for it.
The article’s closing promise comes from Franceschi: Australia has the investment, pipeline and engineering capability to deliver an extraordinary decade of infrastructure, with the opportunity to build more and better, lift productivity and strengthen the construction industry for future projects. The scale is set. The workforce gap is on the record. Here, the institutions and contractors already inside the process mainly answer who shapes delivery.