Take a look north for the road ahead

Remember Laurie Brereton? If you were around in NSW in the mid-1980s, it was hard to forget him. As minister for public works, he made sure his name and face was on billboards at every big government project in the state.

Brereton was noted for tackling difficult subjects and getting things done. Some are long accepted, like the shifting of hospital capacity to Sydney's west, others still stick out as bizarre monuments, like the city's ''monorail to nowhere''.

One of his lasting achievements is literally out of sight, unless you happen to be inside it: the Sydney Harbour Tunnel. Probably the most significant new piece of urban transport infrastructure in our time, it has been a model of a public-private partnership. It was initiated and financed by the private sector and toll revenues, built on time, functions well, and in just over 10 years returns to state ownership with a further 70 years of estimated use.

The tunnel was also a notable example of thinking we can import from Asia - in particular Japan, a country we tend to take for granted now.

A Japanese construction company called Kumagai Gumi had earlier pioneered the building of undersea tunnels in Hong Kong and other places, by precasting concrete tunnel sections and sinking them into trenches in the seabed.

It brought the idea to Sydney to solve a planning impasse over a desperately-needed second harbour crossing. Teamed up with local engineers Transfield, it got the plan through just before Labor lost office. Nick Greiner's new coalition government found it more costly to cancel than let it proceed. History repeats itself this month with Barangaroo, maybe not so happily.