This is yet another instalment in my running theme: the State rail debacle. A saga of privatisation, monopoly infrastructure, and governments that appear to have misplaced both the keys and the contract.

Twenty-five years after Western Australia leased out its freight rail network, one basic question still has no straight answer: what does the Brookfield/Arc lease actually require? Who is responsible for maintaining and upgrading WA’s freight rail network, and how on earth do we force the State to enforce whatever obligations are left?

Because right now, the Wheatbelt is stuck in the worst of all worlds. We have a rail network that is privately held, publicly subsidised, weakly enforced, and increasingly unfit for the freight task we are heading towards.

And before we even get into the clauses, we need to ask the uncomfortable questions that should have been asked years ago.

Were the Tier 3 lines formally surrendered under the lease? Have the Tier 1 and 2 lines been maintained according to the lease? Did Brookfield issue the required notices? Did the Minister respond in writing? Were termination decisions signed off? Were performance standards quietly lowered by agreement?

Or were lines simply waved away into “care and maintenance” because no government wanted the argument?

That paper trail either exists — or it doesn’t.

Either way, it goes to the heart of the issue. Because if government cannot produce the documents, then Tier 3 wasn’t closed by economics. It was closed by drift, silence, and political cowardice.

This brings us to a word most Wheatbelt farmers have never used in conversation, unless they are old enough to have studied Latin at school: mandamus — “we command”.

Mandamus is the legal remedy used to compel a government authority to perform a duty it is legally required to perform.

You cannot mandamus Arc.

But you might mandamus the State.

Because if government has a duty to regulate, monitor, and enforce the lease it administers, then shrugging its shoulders is not neutrality — it is dereliction. It is the State abandoning its own responsibilities while a monopoly quietly runs down public infrastructure and hands the freight bill back to farmers and taxpayers. Sitting on its hands is not an option. It is failure dressed up as administration.

Perhaps what the Wheatbelt needs is less rhetoric and more mandamus — a blunt reminder that contracts are meant to be enforced, not quietly ignored while the track crumbles and the freight task is dumped onto roads.

Now, a quick reminder of the history. WA leased its freight rail network around 2000 for 49 years, through to 2049. The State received $586.7 million. We were told private capital would maintain and modernise. We were told risk had shifted off the taxpayer. We were told the hard work was done.

Instead, what followed was not discipline but amnesia. A monopoly asset leased out, the key details hidden behind commercial-in-confidence, and a network quietly left to run down while governments pretended not to notice.

Tier 3 grain lines didn’t collapse overnight. They were slowly written off, kilometre by kilometre. Tier 2 has been left with speed and axle-load restrictions. Tier 1 has been propped up with state and Commonwealth grants.

The network didn’t fade suddenly. It failed politely. It failed administratively. It failed while everyone nodded solemnly and blamed “economics”, or pointed vaguely to a lease hidden behind the familiar veil of commercial-in-confidence.

So what do we actually know?

Well, some of the core lease documents are publicly available in executed form. But many of the later variations, project agreements, side letters and schedules are not. What exists in the public domain is a patchwork — enough to see the basic architecture, but not enough to see every deal that has been done in the shadows since.

And this is where the rail debate becomes almost farcical. Yes, the headline lease can be found, and yes, it contains comforting language about “fit for purpose” maintenance. But the real story is not in the broad clauses — it is in the schedules.

That is where the operational teeth live: Schedule 4 performance standards, corridor-by-corridor classifications, maintenance benchmarks, lists of surrenderable lines, traffic triggers, and the ministerial approval processes that decide whether a line is kept alive or quietly written off.

Those schedules are precisely the parts that are most often missing, redacted, or withheld under the familiar shield of “commercial in confidence”. So the public gets the motherhood statement, but not the machinery that actually determines what Arc must do, where, and to what standard.

Worse still, many of the most consequential decisions were never really in the original lease at all. They were made later through project agreements, side deals, funding letters, and “care and maintenance” arrangements — the Dedicated Narrow Gauge Grain Lines agreement in 2010, the Tier 3 reopening letters, the surrender negotiations, and the quiet variations that turned “use it or lose it” into “use it if it’s profitable, surrender it if it’s not”.

These are the documents that explain how branch lines disappeared, how standards were lowered, and how obligations were softened over time. Yet they remain largely out of public view. Farmers are being asked to debate the future of rail while being denied access to the very paperwork that explains how the network was dismantled in the first place.

What is available makes for sobering reading. The key wording that keeps cropping up — inserted no doubt at the insistence of far more savvy Brookfield lawyers than the ones the State had sitting across the table — is the term “Fit for Purpose”.

The lease contains a headline obligation that farmers naturally latch onto. Clause 15.2 requires the lessee to: “maintain, replace and repair and upgrade all Leased Railway Infrastructure so that it is Fit for Purpose.”

That sounds reassuring. Farmers read that and think: right — you lease the track, you maintain the track.

But here is the trap. “Fit for Purpose” is not a promise to upgrade the Wheatbelt network to whatever farmers need in 2026.

It is a defined term, tethered to performance standards and commercial use.

It’s like saying a boundary fence must be “fit for purpose” — but never specifying whether the purpose is keeping in Merinos behind five-line station fencing, or stopping Dorper sheep who treat fences as a challenge that needs to be overcome.

In the lease, “fit for purpose” is tied to things like rail safety compliance and existing rail user requirements — not to the future freight task of moving 20 million tonnes of grain.

In other words, it is fit for the purpose the degraded line is currently capable of being used for — not fit for the purpose farmers might need now or in the future.

And that distinction matters.

Because maintenance is not reinvestment.

Replacing wooden sleepers with wooden sleepers is like replacing rusty wire with rusty wire.

If you leased a farm out for 49 years, you would spell out exactly what renewal looks like. You would include replacing 2km of old fence for new every year with 8-90-15, with stainless star pickets at 8 metres and off-the-shelf steel strainers every 400 metres as a minimum.

Why? Because that’s what you do when signing long leases: you lock in improved infrastructure, not weak clauses that let someone replace fences with the same old five-line wire and wooden fence posts that was there before.

Yet that is effectively what was done with rail.

The lease does require the lessee to submit rolling maintenance plans to government. Clause 15 contains provisions requiring multi-year maintenance planning, ministerial oversight, and dispute processes. On paper, government has levers.

In practice, the Auditor-General found years ago that the State often could not even identify what plans had been submitted and what commitments existed, let alone whether they were being met.

A headline claim that the successful bidder would invest $400 million 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.

A contract you do not monitor is not regulation.

It is a bad comedy theatre.

Then we get to the clause that explains why Tier 3 was never protected.

Clause 16 provides the surrender mechanism.

After six years, the lessee can request termination of a line if traffic has significantly reduced and keeping it “fit for purpose” would be uneconomic over the next three years. At that point, the Minister must either agree to terminate the line or step in with payments or other arrangements so the line is no longer a commercial loss.

In plain English: Tier 3 was never protected as strategic infrastructure — it was treated as conditional infrastructure, only worth maintaining so long as it paid its way as it was run into the ground.

And it gets worse.

The lease framework, as later described by the Auditor-General, effectively built in a low-traffic trigger — often cited around 200,000 net tonnes, or where traffic fell to less than half previous levels.

Once a branch line dropped below that kind of throughput, the operator had a contractual escape hatch: declare it uneconomic, seek surrender, and push the cost back onto the State.

That is not neglect or failure.

That is the contract doing exactly what it was designed to do — incentivising the corporate to pay more up front by having to do less down the track.

The Tier 3 death warrant was written into the lease from day one, with no automatic “hand-back in working order” mechanism and no recognition that future grain production might double — which is exactly what has happened.

Some of those lines mothballed in 2011 could today carry a million tonnes if they had been upgraded to good tier 2 21 tn axle load and 80km/hr hour speeds.

And this is the crucial point farmers must understand.

Arc is not obliged to make what they see as marginal grain lines “good as new,” or even maintain them at some heroic standard of regional development. The contract was written with an exit ramp.

The real trick here is the access model.

Arc was not interested in grain-only branch lines. It wanted east–west traffic and corridors with mines on them.

If the traffic on a line is thin — no mining tonnage — the access revenue simply does not cover the cost of keeping that corridor up to a high standard or justify the price it paid for a 49-year lease.

Under that commercial framework, Tier 3 branch lines were from day one seen as liabilities, while Tier 1 and Tier 2 are assets to be milked for every last dollar.

And Arc has no incentive to give up abandoned tier 3 lines, because one day there might be a mine at the end of one of them.

The lease was written with that reality baked in. If a line becomes “uneconomic” under the access model, Arc can trigger the surrender mechanism, mothball it, or demand the State step in with funding.

That is not neglect.

It is contract design by politicians who weren’t thinking about the future.

Or rather, contract design failure — written in to maximise the sale price at a long-term cost to the State.

WA would have been better off leasing the entire network for $1 and writing in that Tier 2 and Tier 3 lines must be upgraded to standard gauge as part of the deal, and then handed back in first-class condition in 2049.

Instead, the State signed away the optionality.

The politicians and political hacks in the Liberals, Nationals and Labor who have been involved in the various deals and side deals over the decades never seemed to consider that a line might become economic again — with higher grain production, new mines, or changing freight patterns.

They signed for the present and surrendered the future.

To be clear, private capital has flowed into rail upgrades — but selectively. Where mining underwrites returns, money appears. 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 farmers have solved the problem by buying bigger trucks, but this comes with longer hauls and higher costs.

Which brings us back to the unanswered questions.

Were the Tier 3 lines formally surrendered under Clause 16? Did Brookfield issue the required notice? Did the Minister respond formally? Was termination signed off? Was funding offered? Were performance standards lowered by agreement? What state will the rail be in at the end of the lease. Whats the cost benefit of buying our Arc

These are exactly the questions that deserve to be flushed out as part of the current Ernst & Young review into the buy-back.

The State Government now says it is progressing toward buying back the lease.

To support this, Ernst & Young has been engaged for due diligence: a $1.7 million contract running through to February 2027, part of $9.15 million already committed to buy-back planning.

Farmers might reasonably ask: does EY’s brief include uncovering who is responsible for what under Clause 15 and Clause 16?

Has the State been duded by Brookfield exploiting loopholes?

Or has the State been duded by its own hopeless negotiation back in 1999 and again over the years ?

And will it be duded yet again — because it refuses to use the full weight of government to bring Arc to the table?

Before government gives up on the rail, it should do four basic things.

• Publish the lease obligations and surrender decisions for Tier 3 lines.
• Table the Clause 16 paper trail corridor by corridor.
• Release the EY report in full when complete.
• And state clearly what it will cost to make the network genuinely fit for purpose vs the cost of grain on road.

Farmers are not asking for nostalgia or rebuilding the rail network in its full 1950s glory.

But if the State government can allocate $14 billion on Metronet and another billion annually in operating losses, then it can sort out the mess that is our regional rail.

We are asking for transparency, enforcement, and competence.

Because the real scandal is not that buying back the lease may cost a billion or two plus another couple of billion to upgrade.

It is that Western Australians are heading towards having a Wheatbelt rail network that is fit for nothing in 2049 unless something is done now to fix past mistakes.