The Daily Telegraph claims the G20 announcement of a Global Infrastructure Hub in Sydney could unlock $7 trillion of infrastructure investment during the next 15 years.

Other news outlets mentioned the fact this Hub will be funded to the tune of $15 million per year. 

That’s a lot of dollars difference in a headline. 

Much as this concept is certainly welcomed the problems I see here are many and varied.

For years governments across much of the world have walked away from funding pretty basic infrastructure like roads as they’ve involved themselves in so many extra areas of our lives.

In other words our tax dollars are being spent on things governments were never put in place for and then we have to pay a private company to use the ‘public’ infrastructure they build for us, a public service which either comes with immense profits to them or taxpayer-funded bailouts when the project collapses.

Once again the biggest problem is the root cause of why, in these past prosperous decades, our governments haven’t been able to fund this much-needed, nation-building infrastructure from the tax base.

The simple answer is that far too many super-wealthy individuals and transnational corporations have avoided paying any but miniscule amounts of tax, despite making billions of dollars profits from the taxpayers who support them twice - firstly, by buying their goods and services and secondly, by using PAYE taxes to provide all the basic services which these companies utilise to make their obscene profits.

I’m hoping this new Global Infrastructure Hub won’t just be an exercise in window-dressing so governments can continue to walk away from their basic responsibilities. 

I’ve recently seen many seemingly sound proposals for projects which would create new industries and enormous amounts of jobs but the people pushing them can’t get either government seed funding or private sector investment to kick start the process.

The major concern I have is the ‘financialisation’ of our society in the past few decades which has seen the vast majority of wealth flow to the people at the top of the financial food chain with companies ignoring ethical and environmental concepts in the pure pursuit of the best possible financial figures for the next quarterly boardroom report, which translates into greater short-term shareholder returns.

The US once again leads the world in this space. One report states the financial sector in the 1950s accounted for just three per cent of Gross Domestic Product, now it stands at 6.5 per cent of GDP but boasts a non-commensurate 24 per cent of national profits in the USA.

This money isn’t building processing plants, roads, railways or creating productive jobs, it’s shuffling paper around to create massive paper profits for those involved in the financial industry.

In his best-selling book The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort describes merchant banking as a form of legalised crime.

Unfortunately the Global Financial Crisis led to a US taxpayer-funded bail-out of the financial industry in that country instead of starting with a clean slate and forming a financial industry which was designed for the good of the nation rather than a select few. Never in the field of human finance has so much been owed by so many to so few, it’s this push by the very rich to become even more wealthy that’s driving the rising cost of living, crumbling infrastructure and global inequality.

So what we really need now is not so much a Global Infrastructure Hub but rather a prime minister who proves he’s as anti-tax evasion, as he is pro-coal. 

At least the conversation started at this G20 to tax company profits in the countries in which they were made, although it looks like there’ll be loopholes big enough to sail the USS Enterprise through. 

Then he can channel all that ‘stolen’ corporate revenue back into the country on whose back that wealth was created in the first place.

And for good measure, put the thieves behind bars in the very jails they’d like to privately fund and profit from.Make the sentencing commensurate with the crime, a year for every billion dollars they ripped off the Aussie taxpayers - there’ll be hundreds of people serving life sentences. 

It’s not socialism, it’s the rightful redistribution of the wealth stolen from us by the moguls of this world, that process is called social justice.