In a big week for the Reserve Bank – board meeting, governor speech, quarterly statement on monetary policy – the attached graph provides one rock of certainty at the start of an uncertain year: Australia’s infrastructure boom is getting stronger for longer.

Industry research and forecasting consultancy Macromonitor has updated its major transport infrastructure summary out to 2023, showing investment soaring over the next two years to run at more than $16 billion a year for the following three.

And that’s just the big-ticket items, the ones that come with ribbons politicians like to cut. The less spectacular rats-and-mice expenditure on transport infrastructure construction more than doubles the total spend to $36-37 billion in 2020.

The infrastructure investment surge serendipitously arrives as housing construction cools, more than compensating for that slowdown and extending Australia’s extraordinary run of unbroken economic growth.