VANGUARD - Expressing the viewpoint of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)
For National Independence and Socialism • www.cpaml.org
(Above: Kalgoorlie is where the Arc Infrastructure and ARTC territories meet, the border between privatisation and state ownership.)
In the year 2000, the Western Australian Liberal government, led by Premier Richard Court, sold off the state’s freight rail network. This act of privatisation marked yet another transfer of collectively built public infrastructure into private, capitalist hands—where it would be exploited not for social need, but for profit.
The sale dismantled a core asset of the Western Australian Government Railways (WAGR), handing approximately 5,500 kilometres of freight rail into private ownership. By 2010, the network came under the control of Brookfield, a Canadian multinational investment giant managing over one trillion dollars in assets worldwide, after it acquired Prime Infrastructure, itself a remnant of the failed Babcock & Brown empire. Today, the network is operated by Arc Infrastructure, an entity wholly owned by Brookfield.
This was not merely an administrative change. It represented a fundamental shift in priorities—from serving the needs of workers, farmers, and regional communities to maximising returns for international shareholders.
Since privatisation, the consequences for working people in Western Australia have been severe. One of the clearest examples is the closure of Tier 3 rail lines across the WA Wheatbelt. These lightly used but socially vital lines once allowed grain to be transported efficiently and safely by rail. Their closure, driven by Brookfield’s profit-first logic, forced farmers to rely almost entirely on road transport, dramatically increasing costs and shifting freight onto trucks bound for CBH silos or directly to the Kwinana grain export terminal.
The social cost of this decision has been profound. Families, school buses, and local traffic are now forced to share narrow country roads with massive grain trucks, many operating continuously during harvest season. Roads never designed for this level of heavy freight traffic have become more dangerous, accelerating road degradation and increasing the risk of serious accidents. What was once a safe and publicly planned transport system has been replaced by a hazardous and inefficient patchwork that places the burden squarely on rural working-class communities—while the private rail operator bears none of the consequences.
In early 2025, multiple media outlets reported on the situation in Greenbushes, a small town in WA’s South West located near the world’s largest lithium mine. Residents and workers raised concerns that lithium dust from nearby mining operations was contaminating household water tanks, homes, and even the local school. A major contributor to this pollution was the constant movement of heavy trucks transporting lithium concentrate through the town to the Port of Bunbury.
Negotiations to move this freight by rail were publicly revealed by the ABC on 17 December 2024 to have collapsed. According to reporting, Arc Infrastructure quoted prices deemed “uneconomical” by the mine’s operator, Talison Lithium—a joint venture involving Chinese and US capital. As a result, the company ruled out a rail link, despite its clear environmental and social benefits. The historical rail line between Bunbury and Bridgetown, shut down roughly 15 years ago by the private operator to cut costs and boost profits, remains closed. Once again, shareholder value was prioritised over the health, safety, and livelihoods of working people in the region.
A similar pattern can be seen in the Goldfields city of Kalgoorlie-Boulder. There is strong support from government and industry for the construction of a freight intermodal terminal—effectively a “land port”—that would allow freight from the eastern states to be loaded and unloaded locally, rather than being hauled all the way to Perth.
Such a development would bring clear benefits to workers across the Goldfields–Esperance region: reducing transport costs, creating jobs, and strengthening regional supply chains. It would also offer significant environmental advantages. A single freight train can replace up to 400 trucks and produces roughly two-thirds fewer emissions for the same volume of freight. Yet progress has been slow, and private control of the rail network continues to act as a barrier to rational, socially planned development.
Arc Infrastructure has had ample opportunity to reinvest in and expand WA’s freight rail network. Instead, it has consistently chosen to extract value—sweating existing assets, closing “unprofitable” lines, and blocking projects that do not meet short-term profit thresholds. This is not a failure of management; it is the inevitable outcome of privatisation under capitalism.
With both state and federal elections approaching, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced that a re-elected Labor government would fund a $2.5 million feasibility study into WA Labor’s proposal to buy back large sections of the privatised freight rail network. While this signals growing political recognition that privatisation has failed, it remains a timid response. Even proposals to return the network to public ownership under the Australian Rail Track Corporation stop short of addressing the deeper issue: who controls and benefits from this infrastructure.
The most effective and genuinely democratic solution is not simply re-nationalisation under a distant bureaucracy, but the transfer of the rail network into direct, democratic community and worker control. The approximately 600 workers who maintain and operate the network—from track workers carrying out day-to-day maintenance to civil engineers planning long-term upgrades—possess the expertise, commitment, and vested interest required to run the system in the interests of society.
Unlike multinational investors, these workers live in the communities the railways serve. They understand that rail is not just a commodity, but a social good—essential for regional development, environmental sustainability, and working-class livelihoods.
The experience of WA’s freight rail network exposes a fundamental truth: infrastructure built by generations of workers should never have been sold. The task ahead is not merely to buy it back, but to break with the logic of profit altogether and place this vital asset under collective, democratic control—where it belongs.