Helen Rowe

In her own words

I started my career studying philosophy because I was keenly interested in the big questions, including how we create a sustainable and fair society, how we assign resources, and the principles underlying those allocations. This exploration led me to dive into studying public policy, and I initially worked in urban planning. When I joined the Victorian State Government I was rotated into the Department of Infrastructure. This was around 20 years ago, and at this time transport was focused on building infrastructure, rather than defined societal outcomes. I could see much work was needed to align transport to what we were trying to achieve in our communities, including reducing environmental impacts from transport, to make people’s lives better, improve our cities and economy.  

Transport immediately got under my skin. I really like big challenges and transport fitted the bill as something that was ready for huge reform and I’ve had a fulfilling career tackling transport issues through policy, delivery, consulting and research.   

My focus has always been on sustainable transport in its many forms and one of the projects that anchored my career was developing the Transport Integration Act embedding ESD principles into transport legislation. It was a really powerful moment of reform and involved extensive consultation was all sorts of stakeholder groups about why we have transport. This work has always stayed with me as a grounding to why we are doing what we are doing.  

Transport is the glue that keeps society going and presents an endless array of interesting, sticky and challenging issues; when you get it right there is great potential to see your work benefiting society. 

The main ‘sticky issues’ that I have been exploring across my career is how do we effect change in transport to realise the big ideas. Through my work and research, I’ve learned that if you can’t take the community and stakeholders with you on a change journey, it doesn’t matter how good the idea is, it won’t succeed. You also need to be planning for change at a system change level, and this is the focus on my doctorate at RMIT which is nearing completion. 

When I joined Climateworks I recognised transport would be the next biggest focus area for decarbonisation in Australia and I wanted to ‘look under the hood’ of the modelling that had been done on transport decarbonisation to understand the assumptions and provide a wider range of modelling scenarios to inform decision makers. In June 2024 we released our report Decarbonising Australia’s transport sector: Diverse solutions for a credible emissions reduction plan to encourage governments and industry to think through what a credible plan to decarbonise Australia’s transport sector could look like, beyond electric vehicles (EVs). The federal government had started work on its Transport Infrastructure Net Zero Roadmap and Action Plan and our report was perfectly timed to align with the consultation for this work. The feedback I got from a lot of people was that our report provided credible modelling that had helped in transport decarbonisation planning and helpful evidence for organisations contributing ideas to the federal government’s process.    

One of the main risks we explored in our modelling was sole reliance on a very rapid uptake of electric vehicles and zero emissions trucks to achieve Australia’s emissions reduction goals. We are very supportive of a rapid adoption of zero emissions technology. But we wanted to ask industry and stakeholders: How rapidly can we uptake new technology? What gap might this leave in transport for achieving Australia’s emission goal? Where can Australia diversify its solutions going beyond EVs? In particular, what is the role for mode shift, efficiency and demand management to increase sustainability? What needs to be in the mix to give us the best chance to get to net zero by 2050? 

Unpacking the impacts

What I am really focused on at the moment - and it’s a hard concept to come to terms with – is just how much change has to happen in the next three decades to achieve our emissions reduction goals in transport, and we can’t make that level of change if we continue to operate in a business-as-usual fashion. I have had lots of rich conversations recently about how we plan for, fund and finance transport and transport infrastructure, and whether decarbonisation is a focus of this process. Hardwiring the consideration of decarbonisation in all decisions will be a key reform of the next decade, to ensure each and every decision is scaling impact. It’s the hard, but really exciting work of the next two to three decades. I think we can get there. At this point of time there is momentum. At the same time businesses are coming to understand that they need to plan for transport decarbonisation because their clients are, and other countries we trade with are. All these pressures are starting to build for change.  

What I am really hopeful about is people rolling up their sleeves on decarbonisation and thinking about how we do transport decarbonisation intelligently, so we achieve the best transport, community, and economic outcomes, including integration with land use planning in cities. A poor outcome would be decarbonising in a way that generates more congestion, higher infrastructure costs and lower quality of life. We need a suite of solutions including supporting public and active transport, zero emissions trucks and moving more freight by rail. This work is going to be the heavy lifting for the next couple of decades. 

Explore to grow

Fairly early in my career working in state government a senior executive offered me a ‘wild’ job, elevating me into an executive role. And he pushed me, saying ‘don’t hide your light under a bushel!’. It was one of the best pieces of advice I have been given. Reflecting on this experience, I recognised that taking on something that looked a bit overwhelming and hadn’t been done before totally motivated me. I will always say yes to projects that seem impossible. I am curious and like exploring. 

When speaking with young women about their careers, I encourage them to build a diversity of experience and, for example, to do a stint in government, particularly if you are working in transport.  It is extremely hard to make change if you don’t understand how the system of transport work. You need to spend the time to build your knowledge of how all the cogs in the system work together, whether that involves the budget, planning, community attitudes or delivery so when you are giving advice and advocating for good ideas, people will want to listen.