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 fundamental had gone wrong in how this State moves bulk commodities across its southern half.
A quarter of a century after the Court Government privatised freight rail, it is hard to argue otherwise. Whatever hopes were attached to privatisation—fresh capital, sharper management, lower costs—the outcome has been a textbook case of monopoly behaviour extracting value while long-life assets steadily degraded. That does not mean the old Westrail model was a success either. It was burdened by debt, ageing rolling stock, inefficiency and, in its Midland workshops were outright dysfunction. State ownership failed once. Private ownership has failed differently, but no less clearly.
What matters now is not ideology, but outcomes.
Despite successive mining booms, a doubling of grain production, growth in east–west container traffic and major rail investment to move iron ore out of the Mid West and Goldfields, the Tier 1 and Tier 2 freight network has been allowed to fall behind. More than 700 kilometres of Tier 3 lines have closed, and entire corridors have been left to decay.
The failure of successive governments to retain leverage over the freight rail lease—first under Australian Railroad Group and later under Brookfield’s long-term control of the below-rail network—has steadily eroded confidence among major freight users. Faced with escalating access charges, inflexible terms and declining service certainty, CBH eventually abandoned reliance on third-party above-rail operators and was forced to step in itself, purchasing and operating its own locomotives and wagons simply to keep grain moving. That was not vertical integration by design; it was adaptation by necessity, driven by a rail system that no longer worked for its largest regional customer.
It is impossible to calculate precisely how far behind the network now sits relative to where it should have been had appropriate capital been injected over the past two decades. But one fact stands out: the Commonwealth has invested billions in long-haul rail elsewhere—Alice Springs to Darwin, Melbourne to Brisbane—because rail makes economic and strategic sense for a country built on bulk freight. Western Australia is not exempt from that logic.
That is why Labor’s January 2024 announcement—just ahead of the State election—that it would explore buying back the remaining 21 years of the freight rail lease was cautiously welcomed by grain growers. It was not nostalgia for state control, but the possibility of resetting incentives: restoring rail competitiveness, improving bin-to-port efficiency and helping growers capture the critical January-to-June southern hemisphere export window before northern hemisphere grain floods the market.
Twelve months on, that promise is wearing thin. We are told work is underway. Consultants have been engaged. Departments are “working through the process”. But there is still no clear timeline, no negotiation framework and no public sense of urgency. For a government that prides itself on delivery, the silence is conspicuous.
Western Australians know this government can move decisively when it wants to. METRONET has seen billions committed to urban rail, with political decisions taken first and business cases refined as construction progressed. Roe 8 was cancelled within weeks of the 2017 election, with more than a billion dollars written off almost overnight. The energy transition has followed a similar path, with coal exits, grid upgrades and renewables funded on political timelines rather than after endless modelling. Against that record, it is difficult to accept that buying back freight rail—the backbone of the State’s export economy—is uniquely too complex to advance.
The same selective approach to decision making is evident at the ports. When government does not want to commit, momentum is replaced with process. The proposed Outer Harbour development at Kwinana—now described as an $8 billion project—has been studied, restudied and re-scoped for nearly a decade. Reports multiply, as the government kicks the decision down the road. Endless analysis is not a replacement for decision making; it simply defers responsibility and shifts costs onto users and the next generation.
If this was China we would have a fully automated port and a high speed standard gauge train running through every country town in WA in the time this government takes to produce a plan.
When it comes to regional rail, this year’s exceptional harvest has sharpened the issue further. Western Australia is expected to produce around 26 million tonnes of grain this season, the largest crop on record. CBH’s Path to 2033 strategy anticipates average receivals of 22 million tonnes within eight years, with peak export outturns of up to three million tonnes a month. On current trends, WA will be pushing 30 million tonnes by the end of this decade, yet much of the freight task is still being carried on a network effectively built for 10 million tonnes and has seen no major upgrade in decades.
The consequences are already visible: damage to regional roads, a growing reliance on overseas truck drivers because there are not enough locals, increased safety risks for passenger vehicles, and mounting logistical stress for farmers and regional businesses. Each big season magnifies the pressure.
That damage is not accidental; it is structural. In the 1950s and 60s, grain moved on five- to eight-tonne trucks. The 1970s brought truck-and-dog combinations. The 1980s saw single semis, the 1990s B-doubles, and by the 2000s much of the task had shifted to 65- to 80-tonne combinations—the current cap on many RAV routes. Each step improved efficiency for both farmers and CBH as the rail freight network failed to keep up. The end result is multiplied stress on gravel and bitumen roads, shoulders and bridges never rebuilt for those loads are facing shortened lifespans. If rail continues to remain uncompetitive, the next push will be for 110-tonne triples, transferring even more cost and risk onto local governments and road users.
The government itself acknowledges this. In a January 2025 media statement, Premier Roger Cook and Transport Minister Rita Saffioti argued that greater public control of freight rail would increase usage, improve road safety and deliver cost savings for industry while supporting agricultural growth and future jobs. These are not radical claims. They are statements of basic freight economics.
We now have a bumper crop, a tax windfall for government, and broad agreement across agriculture, transport and local government that the system is stretched. The buy-back was presented as a serious response to a real capacity, efficiency and safety problem. The only question left is whether the government is prepared to act.
The choice is stark: regain control of the rail network and invest to make it work—or keep pouring money into roads. Either way, billions will be required to fix a problem decades in the making. If the State can find $12 billion for METRONET, it can find the capital to address the consequences of walking away from Westrail.
