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
THERE is one thing Australian governments have become genuinely world-class at: shutting industries down. When it comes to building what comes next, however, the record is far less impressive. The live sheep export ban is shaping up to be the latest – and perhaps clearest – example of this pattern. The Commonwealth has proven highly competent at ending a trade. What it has shown near-total incompetence at, is replacing that trade with anything functional, funded or operational
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
When the State Government committed during the last election to “investigate and progress the potential buy-back of the below-rail freight lease”—to restore public control of freight rail, improve supply chain efficiency and support agriculture and resources—many across agriculture, transport and regional Western Australia hoped it marked a long-overdue recognition that the old Westrail network had become the poor cousin of the lavishly funded metropolitan rail system. It was, at least implicitly, an admission that something
