Call her Priya. In 2024 she and her husband bought a project home in Byford, on Perth's southern fringe, partly because the state government had just promised — and, a year later, delivered — a new train line into the city, and partly because a median house price pushing toward $780,000 in 2025 had put the inner suburbs out of reach on two ordinary incomes (approx.; REIWA / Landgate). The Byford Rail Extension opened on 13 October 2025, connecting her new suburb to the CBD for the first time, built with a share of the same iron ore money that delivered $8.6 billion to WA Treasury in royalties in 2024-25 alone and underwrote a run of budget surpluses stretching back years (METRONET, Byford Rail Extension project page; WA Iron Ore Profile, Jan-2026). Six months after the family moved, Priya's father, visiting for the school holidays, fell in the driveway and was taken by ambulance to the nearest metropolitan hospital. He, and the crew that brought him, spent close to three hours parked outside the emergency department before a bed was free — a wait that, on the state's own ramping data, has become closer to routine than exceptional in a state running one of the largest budget surpluses in the country.
Priya is a composite, not one named West Australian, but every element of her family's year is drawn from the public record examined across this site: the new rail line, the surplus, the ramping. That contradiction — a government simultaneously delivering the best-funded state budget in the country and some of the worst frontline waiting times of any state — is the subject of this scorecard. Roger Cook became Premier on 8 June 2023, when Mark McGowan resigned, and led Labor to a third consecutive term at the 8 March 2025 election, winning 46 of the 59 seats in the Legislative Assembly — the first party to manage that feat in Western Australia since 1989 (Parliament of Western Australia; WA Electoral Commission, 2025 WA State Election results). Judging that government fairly means separating what it can genuinely claim credit for from what it inherited, and weighing both against the outcomes West Australians actually live with.
What the government did
Cook inherited, and has largely continued, fiscal settings his predecessor built. Western Australia's finances turned around from a genuinely troubled starting point: a Special Inquiry commissioned by the state government and led by former Treasury under secretary John Langoulant found in February 2018 that the preceding Barnett government's spending had put net debt on a path past $40 billion with no credible plan to bring it back down (WA Government, Special Inquiry into Government Programs and Projects, Final Report, Feb-2018). Since then, through the McGowan years and continuing under Cook, Western Australia has posted an unbroken run of budget surpluses — $3.5 billion forecast for 2025-26 by the time of the 2026-27 Budget, up from an initial $2.4 billion estimate a year earlier — and cut general government net debt to $26.2 billion, just 7.1% of gross state product in 2025-26, the lowest of any Australian state and, on the government's own figuring, roughly $9 billion lower than it was projected to be when Labor first took office in 2017 (WA Government, 2026-27 Budget Overview, May-2026). Moody's and S&P both rate the state AAA/Aaa, a rating reaffirmed as recently as 28 May 2026, with Moody's crediting "a well entrenched framework of fiscal discipline" (WA Government / Moody's Investors Service, media statement, 28-May-2026).
Much of that money has gone to visible, largely cash-funded infrastructure and direct relief rather than recurrent spending. METRONET, WA Labor's flagship rail expansion, opened four major new lines in the eighteen months either side of Cook becoming Premier — Yanchep in July 2024, Morley-Ellenbrook in December 2024, Thornlie-Cockburn in June 2025 and Byford in October 2025 — finally connecting growth corridors that had waited decades for the trains their street layouts were built around (METRONET project pages, opening dates as published). Health budgets have grown in nearly every year since 2021, including $1.4 billion in new health and mental health spending in the 2025-26 Budget alone (WA Budget Paper No. 2, 2025-26). The government has also used windfall royalty income to fund direct cost-of-living relief, including household electricity credits and fee freezes, on top of the surplus itself. And when a major reform went badly wrong early in Cook's term — the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021, which fully commenced on 1 July 2023, three weeks after he was sworn in — his government reversed it within five weeks rather than persist with a rollout it admitted was unworkable, restoring an amended version of the 1972 Act it had replaced (Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021 (WA); Aboriginal Heritage Legislation Amendment and Repeal Act 2023 (WA)).
The strongest case
A government that inherited a fiscal wreck and built one of the strongest balance sheets in the country
Put the government's record at its strongest, and there is a genuine achievement here that predates, and survives, any single controversy. Cook's government, and McGowan's before it, did not merely halt the debt trajectory the Langoulant Inquiry warned about; it reversed it, cutting net debt while other states' debt kept rising, and it built hospitals and rail lines largely for cash rather than adding new borrowing on top. A AAA/Aaa credit rating held simultaneously by only one Australian state is not simply an accident of the commodity cycle; ratings agencies explicitly credit the state's discipline, not just its royalty receipts, which other resource-exposed jurisdictions have managed far less carefully. The Cultural Heritage Act reversal, while an embarrassment examined in full elsewhere on this site, also shows a government capable of admitting a rollout had failed and reversing course within weeks rather than months or years — a rarer trait in government than it should be, and one that spared landholders a longer period of confusion than a slower backdown would have. And the government has now been tested twice at the ballot box, most recently returned with an increased majority in March 2025 on a platform of continued fiscal management — a mandate few governments enjoy this deep into a third term.
The evidence
Set the fiscal numbers beside the service numbers and the same government's record pulls in two directions at once. On the money side, Western Australia is unambiguously the best-managed budget in the federation on the measures a ratings agency or a Treasurer would recognise: lowest net debt as a share of the economy, an unbroken run of surpluses, a AAA/Aaa rating no other state holds simultaneously. On the delivery side, the same government's own data sources tell a different story. The Productivity Commission's Report on Government Services 2025 found Western Australia had the lowest proportion of any state of Category 3, or urgent, emergency patients seen within the clinically recommended 30 minutes — just 32%, roughly 29 percentage points below the national figure of around 61% (approx.), based on 2023-24 data (Productivity Commission, RoGS 2025, Health — Public Hospitals). Ambulance ramping outside metropolitan hospitals hit a fresh monthly record of 7,257 hours in September 2025, and February 2026 was the worst February on record at 4,892 hours (St John WA / WA Health ramping data, as reported).
Housing tells a similar story of resources not translating cleanly into outcomes. Perth's median house price rose by roughly 50 to 70 per cent between the 2020 downturn and 2025, and the state's social housing waitlist grew past 20,000 applicants by 2024 even as the government's social housing investment reached record cumulative dollar terms (REIWA Market Update; WA Department of Communities, Housing Register data, 2024, approx.). None of this reflects a government spending too little in absolute terms — WA entered this period, and remains, the best-funded state budget in the country. It is a question of whether that funding has converted into the beds, homes and shorter waits the surplus headlines imply.
The critique
The gap between fiscal management and service delivery is the central finding of this scorecard, and it does not reduce to "not enough money." Health spending has grown in nearly every budget since 2021 — a $252 million Emergency Department Reform Package in 2022-23, a further $110 million emergency-access package in 2025-26 alone — and ramping has set a new record after nearly every package (WA Government media statements, 12-May-2022 and 19-Jun-2025). Roger Cook was Deputy Premier and Health Minister for almost five years, from March 2017 to a December 2021 reshuffle, a period across which annual ramped hours climbed roughly fivefold; as Premier since June 2023 he carries ultimate responsibility for a portfolio that, across two health ministers and eight years of Labor government, has never sustainably brought that figure back down.
The Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act saga, examined in full elsewhere on this site, is not simply an embarrassing footnote; it is a case study in the same execution gap. A law five years in development was rolled out with detailed compliance guidance released only three months before it took effect, then repealed five weeks later with, by Traditional Owner groups' own account, even less consultation than its introduction received. Both failures — rushing implementation, then rushing repeal — share a pattern this site has flagged before: treating a stakeholder's reasonable objection as something to manage through announcement and timeline, rather than resolve through design.
METRONET shows the same execution gap in infrastructure terms. The program's total cost has grown from roughly $3 billion at its 2017 launch to $10.5 billion in the WA Government's own 2023-24 Budget Papers, with 2024-25 media reporting citing figures as high as $11 billion to $13 billion (approx.); the Auditor General's Transparency Report series has repeatedly flagged the same projects as running over cost and time in consecutive editions rather than stabilising (WA Auditor-General, 2023 Transparency Report: Major Projects, Oct-2023). And for all the fiscal discipline on show in the budget bottom line, the state has done comparatively little to reduce its dependence on the single commodity funding it: the Strategic Industries Fund, Cook's flagship diversification vehicle, is being built to a total value of roughly $1 billion — a fraction of the $8.6 billion iron ore alone delivered to Treasury in 2024-25 — and the one structural buffer WA ever legislated for a downturn, the WA Future Fund, was repurposed into a narrower medical-research fund in 2020, before it had accumulated anything like a scale that could smooth a genuine price fall (WA Government, "New era for health research and innovation funding," media statement, Sep-2019).
Western Australia has proven it can manage a mining windfall better than almost any government in the country; it has not yet proven it can turn that windfall into shorter ambulance queues, cheaper rent or a second industry.
The risk to the future
A downturn arriving before the delivery problems are fixed
WA's own Treasury does not dispute that its central revenue line is set to shrink. The 2025-26 Mid-Year Financial Projections Statement assumes the iron ore price will fall from an average of US$96.6 a tonne in 2025-26 to Treasury's own long-term estimate of US$72 a tonne in every year from 2026-27 to 2028-29, taking royalty income from $8.6 billion in 2024-25 to roughly $5.8 billion in 2028-29 — a fall of about a third, built into the government's own forward estimates rather than a critic's worst case (WA Government, 2025-26 Mid-Year Financial Projections Statement, Dec-2025). The Simandou project in Guinea, which began operating in November 2025 and is expected to ramp toward 120 million tonnes a year of competing high-grade ore, sits on top of that price assumption as a further pressure the Budget papers do not separately quantify. The Commonwealth's 2018 GST floor deal, which underwrites much of WA's fiscal advantage, is itself under a fresh Productivity Commission review, with a final report due to government by December 2026 — well before the current "no worse off" guarantee expires in 2029-30.
None of that would be especially alarming for a government that had used its boom years to fix its delivery problems and bank a buffer for the next downturn. Neither has clearly happened yet. Hospital ramping and Category 3 wait times are, on the state's own data sources, no better than when the current surplus run began; Perth's housing shortfall persists alongside record nominal social-housing spending; and the one legislated savings vehicle built for exactly this scenario was redirected to a different purpose in 2020. If the price and supply risks Treasury has already forecast land while the ramping queue and the rental market remain this tight, the next West Australian family living Priya's story will be testing this government's fiscal management and its service delivery at the same time — and on the evidence gathered across this site, only one half of that ledger currently balances.