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Infrastructure will be one of the themes of the day, with the federal minister for infrastructure, transport, regional development and local government, Catherine King, due to unveil the revamped Infrastructure Australia body later today.

The minister will also attend the Boomtown property and infrastructure summit in Sydney today with the New South Wales premier, Dominic Perrottet. The summit is seeking to promote the development of western Sydney.

Amy Remeikis reports:

Infrastructure Australia is dead. Long live Infrastructure Australia.

The creation of the body by the Rudd government in 2008 forms part of the prime minister, Anthony Albanese’s legacy.

Albanese has long had a love of nation-building infrastructure projects, and Infrastructure Australia was designed while he was in the portfolio, as a way of identifying and fast-tracking projects which would add value, help future-proof communities, or provide missing links within existing infrastructure frameworks.

At the time, Albanese described it as “replacing neglect, buck-passing, and pork-barrelling with long-term planning where governments predict and anticipate infrastructure needs and demands, not merely react to them”.

But the body set up to help identify and see through nation-building projects became increasingly sidelined, an independent review ordered by the new Albanese government found, and was seen as “reactive” rather than proactive.

That has led to projects languishing, or the states moving forward without all the pieces.

One of the first acts of the Albanese government was to review Infrastructure Australia. King had signalled an overhaul would be a priority of a Labor government ahead of the election, after former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce appointed the retiring mayor of Tamworth to chair the body.

The review having been returned, King will unveil the revamped IA at an event later on Thursday.

The government plans on overhauling the body, giving it a clear and legislated mandate, which will define its responsibilities and role, as well as shift from an advisory body governed by committee, to a new governance model.