The ministerial position for Infrastructure, as it is currently recognised, accounts in overall responsibility for matters that fall within the purview of transport, regional development, and local government.
Since 1928, the portfolio, in keeping with the fluctuating national interests of the times, has expanded to incorporate regulation, safety and funding for the likes of aviation, shipping, roads, railways and policy, making it a kind of catalogue of the shifting modes in this departmental continuum.
The key Transport portfolio in the Australian Federal Government has undergone numerous denotations by the executive branch ever since Prime Minister Billy Hughes inaugurated its forerunner under the title of Minister for Works and Railways back in 1916.
Patrick Lynch is technically the first representative to the ministry.
By 1928, Stanley Bruce, the eighth Prime Minister of Australia, whose wide-ranging reform agenda set the platform for a comprehensive nation building program, appointed Thomas Patterson as Minister for Markets and Transport, bringing with it under the same ministerial umbrella road construction funding which was to be facilitated through grants from the states.
In January 1932 the portfolio was renamed as Minister for Transport but by April it was absorbed into the new portfolio of Minister for the Interior along with the position of Minister for Works and Railways.
Under the Menzies Government in 1950, Minister George McLeay was named Minister for Fuel, Shipping and Transport — a title, at once, with uncommon foresight and oversight – a rarity for government – that lasted 13 years before the Holt administration omitted the rubric of ‘fuel’.
Its origins, however, can be found in a previous Curtin Administration that had sought to establish a government shipping company amid trade disruptions with Great Britain during World War 2.
That eventually became the Australian National Lines with Jack Beasley appointed as Minister for Supply and Development in 1941.
As was recent custom under a Coalition Government, the Deputy Prime Minister has been something of an assumed role for Minister for Transport, which began, if I’m not mistaken, with the appointment of John Anderson in 1999.
For the record, Kim Beazley and Mark Vaile have held both titles but at separate times.
The latest business card for the portfolio will be stretched for space, again, with newcomer Catherine King, named as the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government — the first woman in the role.
She enters the fray at a particularly turbulent time for the national supply chain as it undergoes seismic shifts at home and regionally.
Over the next two decades, the urban freight task alone is expected to grow by 60 per cent according to the Australian Logistics Council even before the ongoing instabilities caused by bottlenecks in Crimea and China are known long term.
Had the Labor Government known its vote would drastically reduce by nearly 600,000 from 2019, an election it lost resoundingly, they might have been less willing to embrace the allure of a change consensus.
The major swing was not just away from the Coalition Government.
It remains to be seen whether it was the lowest voter attendance in a Federal Election since 1922, as had been claimed in some quarters based on early data, but data nonetheless good enough for the new government to be formed.
The incumbent Nationalist Party, a century ago, led by Prime Minister Billy Hughes, only narrowly formed government after it brokered a deal with the Country party famously on the condition of his ouster.
Full preference run-off voting might well have been a workable kludge, to borrow a software term for a stopgap measure, for snap by-elections that somehow never reached sunset.
It has been sheltered within the parameters of a two-party system where one party supposedly propagates a worldview not held by the other, and upstages it on an uninterrupted cycle of primus inter pares.
“Western nations,” writes French novelist Michel Houllebecq, “took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm.”
For all the optimistic talk of reform, don’t discount the 2,800,100 public sector employees in Australia interested in keeping it this way.
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