2021 End of Year Statement

With the second year of the National Freight and Supply Chain Strategy coming to an end, it has been encouraging to see that governments and industry are continuing to make strides in the right direction. Work throughout 2021 has seen huge milestones met, and tangible progress towards improving Australia’s freight system performance being made.

Last year, the Panel identified the primary goal for 2021 as improving the collection and use of consistent national freight data. Achievements on this front include the launch of the National Freight Data Hub prototype website and the release of the Supply Chain Benchmarking Dashboard. As these platforms are further developed, they will contribute to producing a truly multi-modal approach to freight infrastructure and planning. We congratulate the federal government on these achievements, and thank industry for their valuable and vital contributions.

We have commenced work with jurisdictions on developing key performance indicators for the Strategy, to improve understanding of freight performance now and into the future. We aim to refine and implement these during 2022, in time for the next annual reporting process.

We have worked very closely with stakeholders throughout the year, and intend to keep this momentum up throughout 2022. We had one-on-one meetings with state and territory ministers and their senior officials, met with senior industry executives to discuss relevant issues and attended Freight Jurisdictional Working Group meetings. We understand the importance of cooperation between industry and government and our role in supporting it. All of these discussions helped form our independent statement in this years’ annual report.

It is important to acknowledge the great accomplishments, commitments and progress made during 2021 across the four action areas, and in particular, we would like to note:

Smarter and targeted infrastructure investment

• The completion of the Adelaide to Tarcoola re-railing project by the Australian Rail Track Corporation, which was funded by the Australian Government, in early 2021.
• The completion of the Warrego Highway Upgrade Program in Queensland.
• The National Broadband Network, which is now fully operational.
• The official opening of the Toowoomba Wellcamp Trade Distribution Centre in July.

Enable improved supply chain efficiency

• The completion of traffic signal infrastructure upgrades and the installation of smart traffic management technology under the Launceston City Deal.
• Direct international flights between Hobart and Auckland re-commenced in April after more than 20 years.

Better planning, regulation and coordination

• Infrastructure and Transport Ministers endorsed the National Urban Freight Planning Principles in May.
• The Australian Transport Assessment and Planning urban freight modelling guidelines were finalised.
• The Rolling 10 Year Tasmanian Infrastructure Pipeline was released in February.

Better freight location and performance data

• The release of 10 sectoral assessments and 10 commodity-level reports, benchmarking significant Australian supply chains with relevant international competitors as part of the International Benchmarking project.
• A first tranche of detailed analysis under the new Supply Chain Resilience Initiative was completed in April.
• In the 2021-22 Budget, the Australian Government announced it would establish an Office of Supply Chain Resilience.
• The continued growth of the Data WA portal, which currently provides over 2,300 discoverable datasets compared to 1,900 datasets last year.

While we note the significant achievements highlighted in the completed projects above, we look forward to reporting on improvements in key metrics agreed over 2022 as data is the most fundamental way we can truly track progress

We thank jurisdictions for their increased engagement with us throughout the year and look forward to continuing to work with governments and industry to ratchet up ambition and deliver real results through the Strategy.