Over eight years in, Labor still can’t get the basics right

Most West Australians assume that the bridges they cross every day to get to work and home are safe. That assumption is reasonable. Because when governments fail at the basic level of ensuring safety and maintaining critical public infrastructure, everything else they promise and do becomes harder to believe.

This week, The West Australian revealed troubling details about the condition of critical infrastructure on Perth’s Narrows Bridge. Internal Water Corporation reports warned that hundreds of pipe hangers supporting essential water infrastructure are well past their intended service life, show significant corrosion, and carry a risk of catastrophic failure if left unaddressed.

These warnings are not new. The deterioration was first identified years ago, one hanger has already failed, and expert advice explicitly stated that the “do nothing” option was not recommended. Yet despite this, replacement works have still not commenced, and there remains no clear timeline for when they will.

The most concerning aspect of this story isn’t that infrastructure ages; that is inevitable. It’s that known risks were documented, assessed, and effectively deferred. Not because they were unknown, but because they were not treated as urgent.

This isn’t a marginal piece of infrastructure. The Narrows Bridge carries close to 200,000 vehicles a day across the Swan River. It is one of Perth’s most critical transport arteries. If it fails, the consequences wouldn’t be theoretical; they would be immediate, disruptive, and expensive.

So the question isn’t whether infrastructure ages. Of course it does! The real question is why a government in its third term still seems incapable of doing the basics.

Under Premier Roger Cook, Labor has mastered the art of announcement politics. Big numbers. Big visions. Big-ticket commitments. A racetrack here. A sporting franchise there. Always something new to unveil, yet rarely delivered.

But governing isn’t about unveiling. It’s about maintaining.

Bridges don’t care about press conferences. Pipes don’t respond to slogans. Concrete doesn’t miraculously repair itself because a minister declares timelines are “within advised ranges”. Infrastructure either gets maintained or it degrades until failure forces action at far greater cost to the taxpayer.

What makes the Narrows Bridge case so troubling is not just the risk, but the pattern it fits into.

We see it in hospitals, where capacity is perpetually “under review” while ambulance ramping worsens.

We see it in schools, where maintenance backlogs quietly grow while new programs are announced.

We see it in transport projects where disruption is framed as progress, but planning failures are normalised as unavoidable or unforeseeable.

This is what happens when governments prioritise visibility over viability.

The Opposition has rightfully pointed out the contrast between Labor’s spending priorities and the neglect of core infrastructure. But this isn’t really about any single project or portfolio. It’s about a governing mindset that mistakes momentum for competence.

Labor has now had over eight years in office - we're just two months from the nine year mark. Two full terms. Full control of the machinery, including a full-term controlling both houses of parliament. Command of a budget overflowing with cash. And yet we’re told that scope is still being defined, timelines are still being assessed, and funding decisions are still to come.

At some point, “still assessing” stops being prudence and starts looking like avoidance at best, incompetence at worst.

The response from Water Minister Don Punch, that service life is “notional” and inspections are routine, may be technically correct (the best kind of correct). But it misses the point entirely.

Inspections are not outcomes. Reports are not repairs. Knowing something is failing is not the same as fixing it!

And when governments rely on bureaucratic language to smooth over physical risk, public trust erodes fast.

This is not about whether Labor is uniquely negligent. It’s about whether it is governing seriously anymore.

Serious governments sweat the boring stuff. They fund maintenance before monuments. They fix pipes before they cut ribbons. They understand that the legitimacy of the state rests not on what it promises next, but on whether the systems people rely on every day actually work.

When a government can’t maintain a bridge it has known about for nearly a decade, every other promise becomes harder to believe.

Because if they can’t get the basics right — the unglamorous, essential, invisible work of keeping the state running — why should anyone trust them with anything bigger?