August 2025
Two challenges in the frame
Consult Australia President reflects
“If the frame is broken, why keep hanging our future on it?” As he hands over the Consult Australia presidency, Tasos Katopodis sees two “wicked problems” that demand a reframe."
When the GHD executive leader became Consult Australia’s 37th President in October 2023, the industry was still riding the wave of infrastructure development.
In the time since, Consult Australia has consolidated its role as a collaborative
industry voice, published influential thought leadership and welcomed major firms like WSP and Beca back into the fold.
Now, as Tasos prepares to hand over the reins at the conclusion of his term in October, he reflects on an industry
that is both stronger in its unity and facing significant tests.
Government fiscal positions are under strain. The global and national economic growth outlook is
uncertain. In the last financial year, 3,596 construction companies went into administration, according to ASIC,
even as Infrastructure Australia notes a shortfall of nearly 178,000 workers to deliver
current the public infrastructure pipeline.
Tasos is proud of the industry’s adaptability under pressure. “We are an industry that flexes well. We adapt and embrace whatever is ahead of us,” he says. Yet, without decisive
change, two systemic challenges will undercut the sector’s strength.
Challenge #1: Unravelling risk
Consult Australia’s Unravelling Risk report is clear. Infrastructure projects
are becoming more complex, but risk management is stuck in the past. An entrenched “design, construct, litigate” cycle pushes risk down the supply chain, often to the party least able to manage that risk.
“We’ve
ended up with a model that’s adversarial, with everyone for themselves,” Tasos says. “If the model is broken, why don’t we create a new one?”
The stakes are high. Infrastructure Partnerships Australia’s most
recent investment survey found Australia had slipped behind Europe as a destination for compelling infrastructure opportunities, and fallen even further behind North America. Government policy and pipeline certainty are critical to reversing this
trend.
“Private capital will only flow if the risk settings give a high certainty of making a decent profit,” Tasos observes. “Right now, the framework isn’t right for invested capital in Australia”.
Unravelling Risk proposes five reform threads: scoping for success, valuing variations, transparent
timing, refining the rules and resolution over disputation.
Tasos insists that the reform agenda must be shared. “Government has an important role to play, but we also need to look at how we run our businesses, how we lead.
Every party must be prepared to carry the risk proportional to what they do.”
Challenge #2: Digital by default
Australia ranked 18 of 69 economies in the 2025 IMD World Competitiveness Index, but sat at 49th place for productivity
and efficiency, and 42nd for technological infrastructure.
As Consult Australia’s Enabling Digital by Default whitepaper
puts it: “Billions of dollars of infrastructure projects around Australia are still being delivered with paper plans, wet signatures and PDFs.”
“We’ve been slow to adopt technology for decades – artificial
intelligence is just the latest iteration,” Tasos says. Again, Consult Australia has practical solutions: build a digital community of practice, harmonise standards, cultivate capability and skills, among others.
Meanwhile, businesses
are waiting for governments to lead. Governments are waiting for market forces to determine a pathway. “Everyone is waiting for someone else to disrupt.”
As with risk reform, the solutions are within reach if we choose to
lead rather than wait.
Framing the future
The risk of waiting, Tasos warns, is that disruption will come from outside, “just as Amazon Web Services did in cloud computing”.
A platform aggregator could take vast engineering datasets, automate standard design elements,
integrate real-time data and deliver project-ready outputs directly to clients.
Precedents are already here. In architecture, modular construction platforms are replacing components of design work. In engineering, emerging platforms
are automating routine calculations. “The more projects a platform handles, the more valuable it becomes, compounding knowledge in ways individual firms rarely achieve.”
The same forces could create extraordinary opportunities
if harnessed collaboratively. Picture a nationally coordinated digital infrastructure platform, owned and shaped by industry and government together, that combines collective data, engineering expertise and AI capability.
Such a platform
could slash design time, cut waste, improve safety and open new markets for Australian firms, Tasos suggests. It could turn our data advantage into a global export, ensuring that productivity gains benefit not just a single disruptor, but the
entire profession and the communities we serve.
Every generation of industrialisation creates new jobs, Tasos says. He points to research showing that, historically, job losses to technology have
been outweighed by new roles. But the transition requires strong, collaborative leadership.
These are big picture challenges – and both demand a sector that’s prepared to rethink old models, not just adjust them. “We can’t keep looking in the same frame and expecting to see something different. We need to change the
frame.”