WA has a long and bipartisan talent for pretending it is in charge when it plainly is not.
Nowhere is that more obvious than on the 5500km of the old Westrail network — an asset sold at the turn of the century and then quietly abandoned by every government since.
This is not a story about ideology. It is not even a story about privatisation.
It is a story about a State that sold a monopoly asset and then spent the next quarter-century failing to supervise it, regulate it, renegotiate it or even properly understand what it had agreed to.
The privatisation occurred under the Court government around 2000, when the freight network was leased for 49 years, running through to 2049.
What was sold for $586.7 million (including $292.5m for the prepaid lease) bundling up far more than track — rolling stock, yards, depots and maintenance facilities were all part of the deal.
Since then, above-rail and below-rail assets have been split, leaving the State today contemplating buying back what remains of the below-rail lease.
But the deeper failure is not the sale itself. It is what happened next — or more accurately, what did not. Successive governments — Labor and Liberal alike — failed to hold the leaseholders to account.
They failed through multiple renegotiations. They failed through legislative amendments.
They failed despite warnings from their own agencies. And they failed despite an Auditor General report that should have triggered alarm bells.
That 2013 report remains damning reading.
More than a decade after privatisation, the Auditor General found the State could not clearly identify what maintenance and upgrade commitments had actually been made — let alone whether they had been met.
A headline claim that the successful bidder would invest $400m in the first five years of the lease turned out never to have been written into the final contract. No explanation was recorded. No accountability followed. Worse still, the lease relied on the language of “fit for purpose” maintenance without defining what that meant.
There were no objective standards. No external benchmarks. No independent engineering thresholds.
In effect, the State handed over a strategic freight network and then chose not to specify what condition it should be kept in.
Nearly 25 years on, no government can say with confidence how well the remaining rail lines are maintained — or what it will take to keep them running.
The reason is simple. Outside one report, no one has seriously gone looking. Ask operators, shires or freight users and the answers are depressingly consistent: speed restrictions, deferred maintenance, patch-ups and abandoned track.
A slow-motion failure that rolls on because responsibility never quite lands anywhere.
And while governments dithered, taxpayers paid.
Public records show that between 2000 and 2011 alone, State and Commonwealth governments spent or committed about $360m to the leased freight network.
They funded major works on grain lines and key corridors — precisely the long-life investment the private leaseholder was supposed to manage.
In plain English, taxpayers were paying without knowing whether they should have been.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested on effectively two mineral corridors: Mullewa to Geraldton, and Kalgoorlie to Esperance.
Outside those routes, the grain-dominated Tier 2 and Tier 3 network has seen little comparable reinvestment.
Where there is only grain — long-term, lower margin and politically unfashionable — governments step in, corporates step back, and farmers are forced to fill the gap with bigger trucks, longer hauls and higher costs.
The regulator, meanwhile, has mastered the art of being missing in action. It obsesses over pricing formulas and access processes while politely ignoring the state of the track itself. Boxes are ticked. Forms are filed.
Everyone is compliant — except the railway. Asset condition is treated as someone else’s problem. Engineering reality is waived through as an inconvenient detail.
And the system congratulates itself for following the process while the network quietly runs down.
Now the bill is coming due.
With more than two decades left on the lease, the Government faces a stark choice. Do nothing and inherit a network in 2049 whose condition will be a train wreck and whose remediation cost will be in the billions.
Or confront the multinational leaseholder now — armed with transparency, regulatory reform and the political will that has been missing for a generation.
Which brings us to Rita Saffioti.
The Transport Minister now holds a once-in-a-generation decision — and a very large bill either way. Buying back the lease will not be cheap.
Brookfield will negotiate hard. Every weakness created by decades of government indifference will be priced in.
But doing nothing is not a neutral option. Doing nothing means more road spending as rail quietly deteriorates. It means repeating the same mistake that has defined WA rail policy since the Court era: postpone, paper over, and pass it on.
This is not an argument against private capital. It is an argument for competent government.
Monopoly infrastructure behaves like a monopoly unless it is constrained. In WA, it wasn’t.
That was the failure — not privatisation itself, but the absence of discipline after it.
The question now is whether this government is prepared to clean up a mess it did not create — or whether it will join the long list of administrations that chose to look away while the network slowly declined.
