we built this city...

And also its infrastructure. So we've had several years of increasing ambient noise about the state of the nation's infrastructure - roads, rail, dams, skills and so on. The blame game is rampant - federal, state, whatever. About 20 years' worth roughly speaking, we used to more or less have what was needed, now we don't. As the drought in particular bites deeper, water becomes the headline issue and the debate mutates to whether we should curtail use or build more capacity, and then mutates even finer to whether we build dams or desalination plants.

Not surprisingly, to VVB's point of view, is the seemingly corresponding period of time that an obsession with budget surpluses has ruled economic policy in the country. A reliance on market forces - ie the in this case the willingness of private capital to invest in long-lived assets without an immediate and commensurate return on investment - has not, as continually promised, resulted in provision of said infrastructure. Bugger me, I wonder why not?

So to get around this we invented the private public partnership, or PPP, which compounds the problems because it relies on highly sophisticated (for which read dodgy) contractual arrangements between government and a private provider. Merchant bankers and the like have much experience in these types of contract, government typically didn't. And even if suitable expertise was recruited, the desperation of governments (and we're talking all persuasions here) to do the deal ended up with stupid arrangements like Cross-city tunnels where the poor bloody taxpayer gets it coming and going.

Now this is a very simplistic analysis - in fact it's not even analysis, it's jumping to a conclusion based on a simple correlation without proving causation - except it just makes sense, doesn't it? So how long can this insanity go on? Maybe this post on Club Troppo - although focused on application of currently orthodox economic theory to developing nations rather than our own highly evolved island - points to a ray of hope?