Performance from leakage

Australia’s climate helped create its development lead in solar cells, while the needs of farmers on the world’s driest continent have helped it stay on the cutting edge of irrigation technology. It’s Weaven’s hope that super funds might assist in commercialising a piece of Victorian-developed software to track water flows, to better identify where there are channel leaks in need of repair. “Something like twice Melbourne’s total annual water usage could be saved in perpetuity by a comprehensive overhaul of irrigation infrastructure,” Weaven told the National Press Club last year. “Something like 80 per cent of channel leakage comes from 20 per cent of the channels. It’s fixable as long as you know where it is.”

The software could be used to drive remotely operated “modern flumegates” that would allow into properties only as much water as those properties had been allocated, and reduce the losses currently incurred by “19th century wooden infrastructure” which easily over-supplies water. “So for a spend in the order of $1.5 billion over four or five years, water could be saved at a cost of less than $2000 a megalitre, which compares quite favourably even with our currently under-priced water values.” On that basis, investing in such a nation-building project could be a sound economic decision for super funds, but Weaven knows that a “strong political champion” is required before any fund would risk it.

“In the meantime, it does seem to me a national tragedy that Australia’s greatest river can no longer, unassisted, open its mouth to the sea.” The importance of superannuation assets to funding nation-building projects into the future is not lost on Australia’s peak infrastructure body, Infrastructure Partnerships Australia, which recently lauded the new Government’s efforts to streamline the approval of public-private partnerships, under a new co-ordinating body advising Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese.

In a vision statement released late last year, it emphasised superannuation’s potential to “provide a virtuous cycle of cost-effective funding and prudent management over the economic life of an asset that will underpin better quality service delivery. At the same time this forward-looking management of public assets will provide income to retirees into the future. “This win-win formula should be encouraged to take its course, provided governments recognise the opportunities to partner with superannuation funds and the private sector to approach infrastructure with innovative management over the long life of these facilities.”

Whether such a promising, big-picture view can be achieved depends on the regulatory groundwork.