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Kevin Bartholomew
For almost three years, residents and locally owned businesses along Railway Parade in Midland have lived alongside the construction of the new Midland Train Station redevelopment.
From the outset, we have been clear: we are not opposed to the station. Many of us welcomed it. It was one of the reasons we invested here. We expected construction and disruption.
What we did not expect was the sustained pattern of disregard for the local community during delivery. And this, increasingly, appears to reflect something larger than one project.
In December, during a parliamentary committee hearing, the director-general of Transport and Public Transport Authority chief executive reflected on community objections to infrastructure projects.
He observed that in his long career there had never been a project without a group who believed they would be adversely impacted. He likened such opposition to NIMBYism, and suggested history ultimately vindicated major projects.
Those remarks offer insight into how community resistance can be viewed at the highest levels of infrastructure delivery.
Community resistance can become an expected nuisance variable in project delivery, rather than an evidence source that might reshape decisions.
Objections risk being framed as emotional, self-interested and temporary, rather than potentially legitimate or durable.
And “the greater good for WA” can operate as a standing justification that pre-weights the debate in favour of the project proponent.
The results, as residents have described, are not a sequence of isolated mistakes, but repetition, both across projects and within them.
The most visible example has been the near-total occupation of local public parking by project workforce vehicles for almost three years, despite explicit pre-project commitments and repeated senior assurances that this would not occur.
The same pattern has applied to other issues, including unscheduled loud night works outside homes, poor or absent communication, and ongoing noise and dust impacts.
Concerns are raised, explanations are offered, improvements are claimed, and then the behaviour recurs.
This is why so many affected communities say there are “no lessons learned”.
Not because the impacts are unforeseeable, but because the system does not appear structured to treat them as failures requiring correction.
The same contractors reappear, the same behaviours are observed, and meaningful audit or consequence is rarely visible.
Of course, NIMBYism is real. Some oppose development in principle.
But the danger comes when prolonged exposure to that kind of resistance hardens attitudes so that all complaints are placed in the same bracket.
When that mindset takes hold at the top of a department, it inevitably shapes how concerns are interpreted, how responses are written, and how much weight is given to community experience.
There is an important distinction between opposing a project and supporting it while objecting to how it is delivered. Failing to recognise that distinction risks eroding public trust.
Infrastructure for the “greater good for WA” should not require the marginalisation of those who live beside it.
If anything, it imposes a higher obligation: to listen carefully, to adapt when harm is identified, and to ensure that the burdens of progress are not simply absorbed by those with the least power to resist them.
The new Midland Station will open on Sunday. It will be photographed, celebrated and, in time, normalised.
But if infrastructure delivery continues to treat community impact as inevitable collateral rather than feedback requiring change, the same disputes will recur on the next project, and the next.
That is not anti-development. It is a call for better governance.
Kevin Bartholomew is the owner of Commercial Bar and Kitchen in Midland which has been heavily impacted by the Midland station project.
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