Australians face a deteriorating quality of life over the next decade if money is not put into infrastructure such as roads, Treasurer Joe Hockey has warned.
Mr Hockey has offered his state and territory counterparts potentially billions of dollars in tax incentives if they sell off public assets and put the money into new job-creating infrastructure.
He says if more private and public money is not spent on infrastructure then Australia's quality of life is going to deteriorate.
"There is no doubt about that over the next 10 years," Mr Hockey told Fairfax radio on Thursday.
"We have to massively increase our output in order to just maintain our quality of life, and governments don't have a lot of money so we have got to recycle our money."
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That means if there is a state asset that has a willing buyer, that money can be put into another new asset that is going to grow the economy.
"If we don't recycle precious taxpayers' money now in order to drive economic growth, then we are going to pay a heavy price for it in a few years," he said.
