Infrastructure Australia CEO, Adam Copp

Wednesday, 29 July 2026

Check against delivery

Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to be here today.

Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which we meet today, the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to their Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples here today.

It's a privilege to speak to a room that represents the breadth of Australia's freight ecosystem — governments, operators, infrastructure managers, ports, logistics businesses, planners and industry leaders.

This morning I want to set out why freight productivity is central to Australia’s future prosperity, and how the choices we make now will shape the freight system we need for the future. 

I’ll then focus on the investment priorities that matter most: stronger national freight corridors, better-connected ports and intermodal terminals, greater rail interoperability, a more balanced role for road and rail, and the resilience needed to keep our economy moving through disruption.

I’d like to begin today by looking forward — not to the next budget cycle, but to Australia in 2065, the world my children could be living in.

Because the decisions we make now will help determine whether that world is one of opportunity or one of constraint.

Based on Commonwealth Treasury projections, Australia will grow from 28 million people today to 41 million in 2065. 

Melbourne — where we are today — will be 9.1 million people, the size of London. 

Sydney — where I'm from — will be 8.5 million, the size of New York. 

A bigger population and bigger cities mean a bigger freight task, whether we plan for it or not.

If we plan for it well, that future could be a rich, dynamic and resilient country: one where our freight fleet is increasingly electrified, our energy system is cleaner and more secure, and Australian-made low-carbon fuels support aviation, maritime and legacy rolling stock.

It could be a country where the same investment wave now driving data centres, AI and new energy capacity also helps create a smarter, more efficient freight system — with better real-time information, better network management and more autonomous and connected movements.

It could be a country that has adapted to a changing climate, not asset by asset, but by building freight networks with the redundancy, flexibility and resilience to keep communities and markets connected.

And it could be a country whose freight gateways, ports and trade corridors are secure enough to support our economic, defence and sovereign capability ambitions.

That is the prize on offer: a larger, cleaner, more productive and more resilient Australia.

But if we do not plan for that future, freight can quickly become a constraint on everything else we are trying to build — our cities, our regions, our exports, our energy transition and our national resilience.

So the question is not whether Australia’s freight task will grow. It will.

The question is whether we make the choices now that allow the freight system to grow with the country.

Creating a high-performing freight network is a shared national task — dependent not just on the transport sector, but on choices across the economy, from energy and technology to defence and land use.

Given this context, today I'd like to explore how Australia can build a more productive and resilient freight system, and how the work of Infrastructure Australia, including the 2026 Infrastructure Priority List, contributes to that task.

The List represents our independent advice on where investment can deliver the greatest national benefit over the next ten years.

Infrastructure Australia has been very clear in its advice to governments over recent years that freight must remain a national investment priority.

It is why two of the five major investment themes identified in the 2026 Infrastructure Priority List are:

• High Productivity Freight Networks.
• Ports Capacity and Connectivity.

Because ultimately, Australia's future freight productivity will be determined less by individual projects and more by how effectively our freight system works as a whole.

Australia's freight task continues to grow.

Road and rail together carry almost 90 per cent of Australia's freight task.

Over the next 25 years, thanks to population growth, Australia's domestic freight task is projected to increase by around 26 per cent.

That equates to approximately 964 billion tonne-kilometres of freight movement every year.

That scale demands a freight system that is productive, scalable, interoperable and resilient.

Freight underpins Australia's economy, connecting industries, communities and export markets across the country.

Accommodating future growth requires more than additional capacity.

It requires a system that can operate efficiently at greater scale and under more complex conditions.

Those conditions are changing.

Congestion is increasing, infrastructure is ageing, supply chains are becoming more interconnected, and climate and geopolitical risks are growing.

And Australia's freight networks are supporting new demands associated with the energy transition, defence capability and sovereign resilience.

This means that increasingly, the freight conversation comes down to three outcomes:

• Productivity.
• Competitiveness.
• Resilience.

The decisions we make over the next decade will determine how successfully Australia's freight system delivers all three.

That’s where the Infrastructure Priority List comes in.

It is more than a list of projects. It is a framework for national investment priorities, focused on system outcomes rather than individual assets and projects. 

Which reflects a change in how we think about infrastructure.

A rail corridor can have available capacity, but if the terminals, operating rules, port connections or last-mile links are constrained, the system still underperforms.

When Infrastructure Australia developed the Priority List, we deliberately took a system-level view.

We engaged extensively with freight operators, infrastructure managers, governments and industry - including many in this room.

And we asked a different question: where can investment deliver the greatest improvement in freight system performance?

The answer points to a number of strategic priorities.

From that system view, the first place to focus is the corridors that carry freight across the country.

The first priority is strengthening nationally significant freight corridors.

A disrupted corridor can affect supply chains hundreds or thousands of kilometres away.

That is particularly true in regional Australia, where industries and communities depend heavily on reliable freight connections.

This is why the IPL identifies priorities such as:

• Inland Rail interface improvements in New South Wales at key points like Junee and Stockingbingal.
• Freight rail and logistics capacity improvements in the Northern Territory, including the Darwin to Tarcoola rail line and associated intermodals.
• Improvements across nationally significant east-west and north-south road and rail freight routes, the Bruce Highway Upgrade in QLD, resilience improvements on Western Australia’s Great Northern Highway between Broome and Kununurra, and upgrades to Tasmania’s Burnie to Hobart Freight Corridor. 
• These investments improve reliability, remove bottlenecks and strengthen resilience.

The IPL also highlights the importance of improving access for High Productivity Vehicles across key freight routes (including future stages of SA’s high productivity vehicle network spanning key east-west and north-south corridors and similar investments in Victoria) - helping move more freight with fewer vehicle movements, improving productivity and reducing pressure on key corridors.

It is about ensuring every mode can perform as efficiently as possible within the broader system.

If corridors are the arteries of the freight system, ports, terminals and logistics hubs are the pressure points where performance is won or lost.

The second priority is strengthening the places where freight networks connect.

Increasingly, productivity is won or lost at the interfaces.

• At ports.
• At intermodal terminals.
• At logistics hubs.
• And at last-mile connections.

Intermodal terminals are among the most important enablers of freight productivity.

They connect road, rail, ports and logistics networks and play a critical role in determining whether rail can compete effectively for contestable freight.

The Priority List identifies nationally significant opportunities across Melbourne, South East Queensland, Western Sydney and the Northern Territory.

The Western Sydney Freight Line is a strong example, creating a dedicated freight rail connection between Port Botany and Western Sydney, one of Australia's fastest-growing freight and logistics markets, while supporting a major new intermodal terminal at Mamre Road.

Projects like this show what becomes possible when rail, road and logistics networks are planned and integrated as a single system.

The same principle applies to ports.

Around half of Australia's GDP is associated with goods that are either imported through, or exported via, our ports.

More than 99 per cent of Australia's international trade by volume moves through maritime ports, and, increasingly, ports and maritime precincts are supporting a broader set of national objectives, including defence capability, the energy transition, new export industries and sovereign resilience.

Port performance is determined as much by the connections beyond the gate as the capacity within it.

Congested road and rail access, ageing landside infrastructure and constrained intermodal links can limit productivity across the entire freight system.

That is why the IPL identifies Ports Capacity and Connectivity as a national investment priority.

Examples include improved rail access to major gateways such as the Port of Brisbane and long-term planning for future capacity solutions such as Westport in Western Australia.

Then there are the investments in our Defence capability with the enabling infrastructure including road and rail freight to deliver on the Henderson and Osborne bases in WA and SA respectively.

These investments strengthen trade competitiveness, improve supply chain performance and support Australia's long-term productivity.

When we look at this slide, we can see clearly the overlay of the infrastructure priorities and investment needed to deliver against Australia’s freight task – from the road and rail networks and connections, through to ports, intermodal terminals, logistics hubs, and last-mile connections.

What we can also see is the third priority – which is creating a rail network that functions as a genuinely national system. 

Australia's freight task does not stop at state borders, yet too often our rail network still operates as a collection of separate systems rather than a single integrated network.

Today, there are 11 different in-cab digital experiences for train drivers, depending on who they work for and which state they are operating in.

In the past, it was largely physical breaks of gauge. Today, it’s interoperability challenges across:

• Digital signalling systems.
• Operating rules.
• Training and accreditation requirements.
• Data systems and coordination arrangements.

To address these challenges, governments and industry have developed a national Rail Action Plan and the National Network for Interoperability, providing a long-term framework for a more integrated national rail network.

Let me give you an example of why this matters:

The flooding that closed the Broken Hill to Parkes corridor earlier this year highlighted another dimension to the challenge. 

Flooding closed the corridor for ten weeks, and trains travelling from Sydney to Perth had to be re-routed through Melbourne. Drivers had to undertake two weeks of extra training to be competent and compliant in the different safe working rules that applied to that corridor. 

We had the drivers, we had the trains, we had the alternative corridor, but we were stuck for weeks because of “same-same but different” safety regimes in place between corridors. This safety and standards “break of gauge” fundamentally undermines our resilience as a country.

In an increasingly uncertain environment, adaptability is becoming one of our most important assets.

This is where coordination and capability come together. 

That is why one of the most important proposals identified in the Infrastructure Priority List, which comes from the NRAP, is National Interoperability of Digital Signalling and Train Control. It is actually the very first project on the List because we view it as so important for the long term productivity of the country.

Better interoperability improves safety, reduces delays, increases capacity and enables freight to move more efficiently across the country. 

It also creates the foundation for technologies such as advanced train control, predictive maintenance and real-time freight management.

Most importantly, interoperability helps us extract greater value from the infrastructure we already have.

Some of Australia's most significant productivity gains will come not from building new infrastructure, but from enabling existing infrastructure to work better together.

The goal is a fully integrated national freight system where rail plays a greater role, regions connect more seamlessly to national corridors, and freight moves with fewer operational barriers.

I’m sure both Wayne from ARTC and Michael from the NTC who are at the coal face of this reform will expand in more detail. 

Improving freight productivity ultimately requires both investment and reform: investments that strengthen the network, and reforms that enable it to operate as a single national system.

That brings us to the fourth opportunity: achieving a better balance between road and rail.

Road freight remains the backbone of Australia's freight system. 

It provides essential first and last-mile connectivity, supports regional and remote communities, and carries around 80 per cent of Australia's non-bulk freight task.

However, Infrastructure Australia's analysis shows that, unless current trends change, pressure on the road network will continue to intensify. 

Around 77 per cent of future freight growth is expected to be accommodated by road, compared with around 6 per cent by rail. 

I want to be clear: this is not road versus rail.

It is about each mode doing what it does best, and ensuring the whole network performs better as a result.

Rail already carries more than 70 per cent of Australia's bulk freight task, but only a relatively small share of Australia's contestable freight.  

Increasing rail's share of that market represents one of the clearest productivity opportunities identified through the Infrastructure Priority List.

Rail can move larger volumes efficiently and over longer distances, reduce pressure on key road corridors, and support both safety and decarbonisation objectives.

But increasing rail mode share depends on rail becoming more competitive.

Reliability, interoperability, terminal capacity and network connectivity all influence customer decisions.

For many freight customers, certainty is often more valuable than cost or speed, and repeated disruption can quickly shift freight onto roads.

That is why so many of the IPL's priorities, including corridor upgrades, interoperability reforms, improved port connectivity and greater intermodal capacity, ultimately support a stronger role for rail within a balanced freight system.

The goal is not simply to move freight from one mode to another. 

It is to build a freight system that is more productive, more resilient and more competitive, with rail playing a greater role where it can deliver the greatest benefit.

Now I’d like to reflect on a unifying issue underpinning all of this – resilience. 

Resilience is not a separate issue sitting beside these priorities; it underpins it all.

Stronger corridors, better-connected ports and terminals, greater interoperability and a more balanced road and rail task all matter because they help the freight system keep performing under pressure.

Recent years have shown how quickly disruption can cascade through supply chains, affecting industries, communities and economic activity across the nation.

From Infrastructure Australia's perspective, the biggest vulnerability is not a single asset or corridor; it is how the network performs end to end under pressure.

Resilience depends on how infrastructure, supply chains and workforce capability perform together when conditions change.

And that matters more than ever as we navigate the energy transition, increasing climate risks, defence requirements and sovereign capability priorities.

We have to realise that productivity and resilience are increasingly inseparable.

A corridor that cannot recover from disruption is not productive.

A port with constrained landside access is not resilient.

And a freight system with limited alternatives is not efficient. It’s vulnerable. Particularly in northern and remote Australia, where extreme weather and flooding continue to be a very real issue. 

Finally, one of the clearest messages emerging from Infrastructure Australia's Market Capacity work is that Australia's challenge is no longer simply identifying projects. It is having the capability to deliver them.

Workforce availability, materials, specialist engineering expertise and supply chains are increasingly the constraints shaping infrastructure outcomes across the country.

I began today by asking us to look forward to Australia in 2065 - a larger country, with bigger cities, a bigger freight task, and higher expectations of the systems that connect communities, markets and industries.

The point I want to leave you with is that this future is not something that simply happens to us. It will be shaped by the choices we make now: whether we build freight corridors that can carry the task ahead, ports and terminals that connect efficiently to the economy, a rail network that operates as a national system, and a balanced freight network that can keep performing through disruption.

If we get those choices right, freight becomes more than an enabling service. It becomes one of the foundations of a cleaner, more productive and more resilient Australia.

If we get them wrong, freight becomes the constraint on the very future we are trying to build.

So the task before us is clear: plan nationally, invest deliberately, coordinate across governments and industry, and build the freight system Australia will need — not just for the next project cycle, but for the country we want to become by 2065.

Thank you.