Hello and welcome to another MLEX podcast. I'm Laurel Henning, senior correspondent at

Emlex, and today I'm in our Auckland offices in New Zealand, in the heart of the city's

business district.

And joining me today from Melbourne is Australasian managing editor, James Panicki.

Hi James.

Hello Laurel.

Today we're going to discuss Australian toll roads.

In late August, the consortium led by Australian Infrastructure Company Transurban Group saw

its bid cleared for a majority interest in Sydney's West Connect's Toll Road project.

The group's bid for the 16.8 billion Australian dollar project, or 11.94 billion in US,

isn't expected to substantially lessen competition for future toll roads, according to Australia's competition chief Rod Sims. Regulatory clearance for the bid leaves

the Transurban Group as the builder for the project to construct a 33 kilometre turnpike in western

Sydney. Construction began back in 2015 and is scheduled for completion in 2024. James, this is an enormous project in Australian

infrastructure with long-term implications. Tell me something about the context of this deal.

Okay, look, firstly, it should be said that until recently Australia didn't have much of a tradition

of tollways other than obviously throwing coins into a bucket before crossing

the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which has always been a bit of a tradition. But toll roads, as you

and I would understand them, so things linked to specific transit projects, well, these are a relatively

new phenomenon in Australia. Melbourne's city link came into effect in the late

1990s and a lot of others followed after that. So this isn't a country like, for example,

Italy where tolls have been a feature of highways more or less since they were built in the

1950s and 1960s. So with toll roads building up relatively recently, it's a

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