Victoria’s Big Build Royal Commission Exposes Decades of Neoliberal Infrastructure Failures and Corporate Capture
Original framing: “What we learnt on the first day of Victoria’s Big Build royal commission” — The Conversation - Global
Marginalised voices—particularly those of disabled workers, migrant labourers, and single parents—have been systematically excluded from Big Build’s planning. The *Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission*’s 2021 report found that PPP contracts often include 'flexible' labour clauses that enable wage theft, disproportionately affecting migrant workers. Disabled advocates, like those in the *Disability Rights Victoria* coalition, have highlighted how Big Build’s 'universal design' claims fail to meet the *UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities* standards. The commission must centre these voices, as their experiences reveal how infrastructure failures are not 'accidents' but designed outcomes of cost-cutting.
Victoria’s Big Build royal commission is not just about fixing failed projects—it is an opportunity to dismantle the neoliberal infrastructure model that treats public assets as profit centres and communities as collateral damage.
The historical parallels to Kennett-era privatisations and the 1990s EastLink scandal reveal a pattern where corporate lobbying and short-term cost-cutting create long-term crises, disproportionately harming working-class suburbs and Indigenous communities. The commission’s power lies in its ability to expose how 'technical' failures are structurally designed—whether through PPP contracts that prioritise shareholder returns, the exclusion of Aboriginal knowledge systems, or the erasure of marginalised voices in planning. Solutions must centre public ownership, democratic oversight, and reparative justice, drawing on models from Germany’s state-led infrastructure to Singapore’s cross-subsidised housing. The trickster moment here is to turn the tables on the corporations that framed this as a 'technical' issue, demanding accountability from the 'very top'—where the real decisions were made to privatise, underfund, and then blame the system when it inevitably fails.