Brisbane's infrastructure has boomed with the CLEM7, Airport Link and Gateway Bridge expansion but are the golden days over? NEW PROJECT: An artist impression of the proposed Gabba Station from the Cross River Rail project. IS QUEENSLAND'S golden age of big public infrastructure projects over? Will Brisbane ever again see the likes of another Gateway Bridge or its recently built twin, or an Airport Link Tunnel or a Clem7, even if demand for such projects continues unabated due to a growing population? Will we ever get a second Brisbane CBD river rail crossing, even though we're told the told the current one is due to reach capacity within just a few years? And whatever has happened to the long-promised parallel runway, a project Brisbane Airport Corporation has identified as a priority ever since it took over the airport lease from the federal government in 1997? Doubts surface over Legacy Way traffic forecasts Editorial: Time to secure transport infrastructure Will Toowoomba ever get its second range crossing, even though everyone agrees it is urgently needed and despite the millions of dollars already spent in planning the project? And will the Bruce Highway, the worst stretch of the national road network, every be upgraded despite decades of promises from politicians of all persuasions? Last week's Brisbane City Council Budget and the State Government's Budget just a week earlier make it perfectly clear the massive, multi-billion-dollar capital works boom of the past half-decade, which has given Brisbane some of the most modern roadworks in the country, is all but over. The biggest ticket item in council's latest infrastructure plan is a $360 million-plus upgrade of Kingsford Smith Drive, much needed and planned for years. But there's a very big catch. The work will only go ahead if the council can successfully sell off its tolling rights to its still-under-construction Legacy Way tunnel to QIC, the state-government-owned body that looks after the superannuation of state public servants. Council is counting on getting several hundred million dollars for the deal, which it foreshadowed in January, but it still has a way to go. Not only have questions been asked about why QIC was the only superannuation fund invited to bid for what could be a very attractive long-term investment - particularly if council guarantees a minimum revenue flow - but also it still has to get clearance from both the State Government and the Commonwealth, which has $500 million of its own money invested in Legacy Way. In other words, as good as an idea as upgrading Kingsford Smith Drive might be, council still doesn't have the money to do the work. The State Government's Budget of a week earlier was very much the same. Just a few years ago, the Labor state government was producing huge annual capital works budgets of up to $18 billion a year, to cover such big-ticket items as the $9 billion southeast Queensland water grid and a $1.8 billion duplication of the Gateway Bridge and associated roadworks. But that was before the global financial crisis, when everything changed, virtually overnight. Treasurer Tim Nicholls' second state Budget revealed a capital works program of $11 billion for 2013-14. That's still a big number, but historically it's the sort of money the government needs to spend just to keep things ticking over. It's also 40 per cent below pre-GFC peaks. As soon as the full implications of the GFC became apparent, governments and companies decided debt was the enemy, even though it was debt that had fuelled the building boom of recent years. The Newman Government came to office determined to slash borrowings, which it claims would have reached $80 billion or more without action, and restore the state's AAA credit rating. This means the State Government isn't going to build anything big unless it can work out a way to fund it without new borrowings. That's how it got its new Executive Building at 1 William St - by giving developers a 99-year lease on a spare block of Government-owned land in the CBD in return for a 15-year lease in the $650 million building now under construction. When then premier Peter Beattie decided in the early 2000s that southeast Queensland needed droughtproofing, in the midst of one of the state's longest ever dry spells, he committed the state, seemingly within weeks, to nearly $9 billion in new water-related infrastructure projects, from the Tugun desalination plant to the soon-aborted Traveston Dam. Forget for a moment the political controversies of the time, the start-up problems of the desalination plant, debate about whether anyone would ever agree to drinking recycled water and the fact that almost as soon as the water grid was finished, built in record time, the rains started falling and Queensland was soon facing its worst floods in decades. The point is, Beattie had the borrowing capacity to make things happen. And when Campbell Newman become lord mayor of Brisbane with bold plans for tunnels around the city, there was, initially, little trouble at all finding private-sector backers to invest in the Clem7 tunnel and Airport Link, which had a combined construction cost of about $6 billion. But within a year of opening, both of these state-of-the art civil engineering projects were in receivership as a result of, among other things, bewilderingly high estimates of traffic usage. Even if the tunnels had paid their way, it is still unlikely we would see the private sector keen to jump back into such risky public infrastructure investments for many years to come. Before the GFC, private backers would take on all sorts of risk if they could convince themselves the returns might be high enough. Now, investors will only back projects that are underwritten by Government. This appears to be the model being used in council's planned sale of Legacy Way's tolling rights to QIC. It is expected that in return for an upfront payment of possibly up to $300 million, council will provide some sort of patronage guarantee. We can only guess at the figures, however, because council has refused to provide any details. At the state level, a new Projects Queensland division has been set up within Treasury. Its job is to "enhance the Queensland Government's infrastructure capability." But it too is facing the enormous problem of how to fund the projects it identifies. The No.1 project on its wishlist is Toowoomba's second range crossing, which has been a priority of successive state governments. The state has completed its business case for the new crossing and has sent it off to the Federal Government's big projects advisory body, Infrastructure Australia, for consideration. But even if the technocrats give it the tick, the state would have to wait for the federal government of the day to decide it had to money to proceed. And that, perhaps, is the single biggest problem we are now facing in attempts to pay for new infrastructure - developing a sufficiently bipartisan and robust method for identifying and then funding such essential new projects as Brisbane's $5.4 billion Cross River Rail scheme. Both the State and Federal governments agree this is a project of the highest priority and both levels of government have agreed, in principle at least, to each tip $715 million into a development that private-sector proponents are reportedly champing at the bit to build. But instead of getting on with the job, the state and federal governments have turned Cross River Rail into a political football, with each side now arguing over the detail of the potential funding. The dispute boils down to how much of the federal contribution would be offset by a cut in the state's share of GST funds. The Commonwealth says the figure should be 50 per cent. The state says zero. We now have a political stalemate driven by self-interest and game-playing in the last, heated months before the next federal election. The problem for the state is that federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has said he doesn't think federal governments should be funding urban rail projects, which translated into an easy free kick for the Gillard Government. It Newman accepts the money now on offer, Abbott would have a lot of explaining to do to southeast Queensland voters keen for the project to proceed. If the state refuses to take the Commonwealth funds, regardless of its concerns over the attached strings, it runs the risk of being accused of simply playing politics to protect Abbott. Big projects will continue to be built in southeast Queensland. Population pressure and the need to keep upgrading our current stock of civil works demand it. But the easy times are over, possibly for many years to come. What we will probably start to see more of is further sales of government assets, perhaps not the one-off, high-value items such as the state's power distribution networks and the electricity generators, but tracts of land and other smaller government businesses that, the argument will go, can be just as well run by the private sector. State Infrastructure Minister Jeff Seeney delivered a clear message on future direction in a speech to the Property Council this week when he noted that 75 per cent of Queensland's land, valued at nearly $68 billion, was controlled by the state. "That's much more land than the state could ever want, or need," Seeney said. We are taking steps to look seriously at the underused land we have on the state's balance sheet, potentially worth billions of dollars, and work out how it can best be used. What happens next is anyone's guess. But, for now, it's fair to say that the massive roadworks that have disrupted large tracts of southeast Queensland in recent years will soon be disappearing, if they haven't already. The city's motorists are now better served than they were five years ago, with figures showing our new, expensive tunnels have already had a significant congestion-busting effect. But sooner or later we will need similar projects in the future, along with substantial improvements in our public transport network. How we get them will be one of the great tests of not only this first-term Newman administration but also for governments to come.