Has WA Labor gone cold on Tier 3? Calls for road and rail investment business cases to be made public

Shadow treasurer Steve Thomas is ratcheting up calls for WA Labor to reveal the contents of two agricultural freight route business cases pitched to Infrastructure Australia, as fears mount the State has gone cold on reopening WA’s Tier 3 rail lines. The State Government is preparing a stage-two business case to submit to Infrastructure Australia to secure more funding for the WA Agricultural Supply Chain Initiative, or WAASCI, after securing $160 million from the Federal Government in September. The State Government has also tipped $40m to bring the total to $200m for stage one of the WAASCI initiative, with works on those projects expected to start later this year. But exactly what the $200m will be spent on and what the State Government will pitch to the Federal Government in the second business case — including what projects it wants funded and how much they would cost — has not been publicly disclosed. Mr Thomas said it was crucial WA Labor told the public what it was asking for from Infrastructure Australia in both business cases, including whether it was chasing funding to reopen any of the Wheatbelt’s shuttered Tier 3 lines. “The decisions on how this $200m package will be spent should have been made,” he said. “Private businesses and individuals have to make big decisions based on what this (the road and rail network) is going to look like in the future, and big decisions at that. “Messing around and hiding it means that people are either going to make uninformed decisions or poor decisions.” Some farmers hoped the State Government would request funding to reopen at least some of WA’s mothballed Tier 3 lines, which were closed by rail lessee Arc Infrastructure in 2014 on the grounds that they were not commercially viable. WA Labor commissioned the first engineering assessment to determine how much it would cost to reopen the lines in 2020. It found repairing and reopening all 509km of the lines would cost a whopping $1.09 billion. At the time, Ms Saffioti said the State hoped to secure $500m in Federal Government cash to reopen three “priority” lines — Quairading to York; Kulin to Narrogin; and Kondinin to West Merredin. But a spokeswoman for her office this week declined to comment whether the State Government was still prioritising those lines, instead saying the entire Tier 3 network had been analysed “as a package” and required “further investigation”. She said the State had finalised the stage two business case and was “in the process” of submitting it to Infrastructure Australia, and it was “process” for a summary of the contents to be made public once Infrastructure Australia’s assessment was complete. “The (stage one) business case identified and analysed a range of road and rail infrastructure options, including the Tier 3 lines,” she said. · “The stage two business case analysed Tier 3 as a package and recommended further investigation into rail infrastructure investment, including analysis of individual lines.” The spokeswoman said the funds would build on the State government’s Revitalising Agricultural Freight Strategy, which identified numerous worthwhile rail freight upgrades when it was publicly released in June 2020. Mr Thomas has repeatedly probed the State Government for answers on whether the business cases will be made public, asking questions in WA Parliament on June 22 and 23, August 31, November 17 and February 15. He this week questioned what funding WA Labor was targeting, and whether there would be any funding available prior to the Federal Election, given round six of the Federal Government’s Building Better Regions Fund closed last month. “If they were going to progress it in the lead up to the election, they have missed that boat,” he said. “If the Federal Government was interested in funding (the stage two projects), the State Government has messed that up.” Last year, Ms Saffioti told media the State Government would wait for the finalisation of the business cases for reinstatement of some of WA’s Tier 3 grain lines before confirming if any funds would be allocated to them in the State budget last September. But while the WA Government committed $22m to rapid rail loading infrastructure at four CBH bins ahead of the State Budget — its biggest investment in grain on rail since 2010 — there was no funding for Tier 3 lines. The stage-one business case — called the WA Agricultural Supply Chain Improvements Stage 1 Options Assessment business case — was added to Infrastructure Australia’s priority list in February 2020. The list is updated once or twice a year as a guide to prioritise Federally funded infrastructure investments in Australia. WA’s ageing rail network is buckling under the pressure of the State’s record 23.1Mt record harvest, with this year described by some growers as the “litmus test” for how it can cope with a crop size that has grown 200 per cent during the past 30 years. About 60 per cent of WA’s annual harvest is moved to port by rail each year, and the rest by road.