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
Western Australia’s grain freight debate has become oddly unhinged. We talk endlessly about road damage, truck numbers, safety, emissions and who should pay. Rail tragics insist that reopening Tier 3 lines will solve all our problems. Road realists respond that we should simply widen and upgrade roads to allow triples. Yet the one thing farmers and road users actually need to have a rational debate about is largely absent: a clear, public, apples-to-apples understanding of what it
The WA Labor Government has a curious habit when it comes to big decisions. When it wants something badly enough, it moves at speed. When it doesn’t, it buries the issue under consultants, reviews and “process”. Right now, freight rail sits firmly in the second category. In the lead-up to the last State election, Labor committed to “investigate and progress the potential buyback of the below-rail freight lease”. Translated into plain English, that means regaining
