Opinion Articles

State’s long rail tale of woe

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

Trevor Whittington February 13, 2026

Research and Reports

Auditor General report finds serious issues in Maintaining Regional Local Roads

Western Australia’s Auditor General has tabled the Maintaining Regional Local Roads report in Parliament which highlighted a number of problematic issues including: The condition of Western Australia’s Local Government (LG) road network is largely unknown because it is neither measured nor consistently reported. This lack of data undermines maintenance planning, prevents accurate assessment of maintenance effectiveness, and obscures the true scale and cost of the maintenance backlog. The inconsistency of asset management across LGs increases

Darren Brown November 13, 2025