City of Monash: Re-thinking Budgeting Through Nexus-Based Asset Planning

Located in metropolitan Melbourne, the City of Monash is home to over 200,000 residents and manages billions of dollars of infrastructure assets across roads, open space, facilities, and community buildings. As a progressive council, Monash has become a leading example of re-thinking budgeting through a whole-of-portfolio approach.

The challenge for Monash was balancing renewal and maintenance with new investments and upgrades, while ensuring that decisions genuinely reflected what the community valued. Traditional budgeting models often struggled to show the interdependencies of assets and the long-term risks posed by climate, demographics, and changing service expectations.

To address this, Modelve introduced Nexus-Based Modelling across all of Monash’s infrastructure assets. The approach transformed technical data into community-facing narratives, using storyboards and scenarios to illustrate the next twenty years of choices and consequences. This helped the council and community deliberate together on trade-offs, risks, and priorities.

Through comprehensive modelling, community-facing storyboards, and workshops with elected members, Monash embedded these models directly into its Asset Plan. The result was stronger alignment between financial decisions and community expectations, improved transparency in how renewal and new investments were balanced, and reduced bias in the budgeting process.

This case study highlights how Monash City has shown that re-thinking budgeting through Nexus-Based Modelling not only improves long-term asset management but also builds community trust. By turning data into shared stories, the council has set a benchmark for transparent and participatory decision-making.