Funding the future: financial sustainability and infrastructure finance in Australian local government

Funding the Future represents a pioneering attempt to comprehensively explore and assess financial sustainability in Australian local government. It focuses on Australian fiscal federalism and the place of local government in this structure, it provides a critical assessment of methodologies and findings of the various national and state public inquiries into financial sustainability in local government, it offers an exploration of ‘holistic sustainability’ as distinct from the narrower ‘financial sustainability’ in local government, and it presents a detailed assessment of different approaches to local infrastructure funding, including an Australian municipal bond market, a Commonwealth local infrastructure fund, municipal banking and an Australian municipal bond bank. While the emphasis falls squarely on Australian local government, Funding the Future draws on extensively on both the international conceptual and empirical literature.