New South Wales has a number of successful public infrastructure projects provided by the private sector. Involvement of the private sector provides the wider community with facilities and services at an earlier time-frame than otherwise would be the case and allows private sector innovations and efficiencies to be applied to project and service delivery.

The aim of the Guidelines is to improve dealings in this area between the public and private sectors. The Capital Works Committee of Cabinet has endorsed the revised Guidelines entitled, "Principles and Guidelines for the Private Sector Participation in the Provision of Public Infrastructure", which are attached.

The principle features of the Guidelines are:

• involvement of the private sector in the provision of infrastructure must show net benefit to the community;
• the Capital Works Committee of Cabinet is the approval authority for all privately financed infrastructure projects; agencies are required to have undertaken considerable analysis of a proposal prior to approaching the market;
• agencies will need to demonstrate to the Capital Works Committee that they are fully skilled and resourced to effectively manage the project; privately financed infrastructure will be subject to a competitive bidding process and only in very exceptional circumstances will direct negotiations be considered by Government;
• preference will be given to project proposals that are financially free-standing and without any Government capital contributions, although limited contributions may be considered where genuine community needs are not able to be fully satisfied otherwise; contract summaries will be made publicly available;
• the Government may consider reimbursing proponents where the Call for Detailed Proposals process has been aborted through Government action that is unrelated to any commercial or technical aspect of the proposal.