By Darian Macey, February 2 2026
Vehicle access to Garden Island, WA, is now a capability tax — and Canberra is pretending it’s a Rockingham inconvenience
If you’re in Canberra making decisions about naval capability, sustainment capacity, workforce growth, and AUKUS delivery, you should treat the Stirling access debate as more than a local roads squabble.
HMAS Stirling is Australia’s largest naval base, with an on-base population commonly cited at roughly 2,300 service personnel, 600 Defence civilians and 500 contractors (around 3,400 people). That is before you count visitors, delivery drivers, short-term contractors, and surge periods.
Yet the base is effectively fed through a constrained road network and a single causeway connection built in the early 1970s. When that access chokes, capability doesn’t stop — it just gets more expensive, less reliable, and harder to schedule.
Public backlash to “ruled out highway”
In December, reporting on a Main Roads WA feasibility study signalled the Garden Island Highway concept was not supported, with the study pointing to environmental, amenity and safety impacts.
But the more revealing part of the story isn’t the outcome – it’s the public reaction.
The comments are blunt: people say the assessment does not match what they see at shift change. “Obviously they don’t travel to Stirling alot….” and “Did they even visit the base ?” are typical. Many read the outcome as another deferral dressed up as pragmatism: “Sounds about right, a half arsed fix.” Others frame it as a looming AUKUS failure in plain language: “Ok so let’s wait till all the Americans and Australian Defence Personnel arrive for the AUKUS submarines to congest the roads then start looking at fixing it… Fail to plan results in a plan to fail.”
Even if you accept the findings of the study, the real point is this: the congestion problem didn’t vanish with the highway option. It was simply returned it to the “too-hard basket”, while the strategic workload at Fleet Base West continues to rise.
What the local studies are already signalling
Local planning material has been warning about “significant congestion” and queueing impacts across the network, including references to queue length issues tied to Safety Bay Road intersections.
At the same time, the issue has been live enough to reach WA Parliament via questions and debate on Garden Island Highway feasibility and timelines.
In other words: the constraint is known, documented, and escalating. The remaining question is whether Defence, Commonwealth, and WA will keep treating it as someone else’s problem.
What the delays are likely costing
Let’s put dollars on what is currently being shrugged off.
Assumptions (all conservative):
- affected workforce: 3,400 daily travellers (service + APS + contractors)
- working days: 220 per year (typical weekday pattern)
- value of business travel time: calculated using a recognised appraisal convention (business travel time valued at 129.8% of Average Weekly Earnings).
- Average Weekly Earnings (full-time adult ordinary time): $2,011.40 (May 2025, Australian Bureau of Statistics)
- convert to hourly using a 38-hour week (standard in the same guidance).
This yields an implied business value-of-time of about $68.70 per person-hour (52.93/hr × 1.298).
Now the cost range, based on average total delay per person per day (both directions combined):
- 10 minutes/day: about $8.6m per year
- 20 minutes/day: about $17.1m per year
- 30 minutes/day: about $25.7m per year
That is just labour time burned in traffic. It excludes:
- missed maintenance windows and knock-on schedule resets
- late starts spreading across tightly sequenced ship/submarine support tasks
- freight and courier delays (which carry their own time and reliability costs)
- safety and incident risk in congested pinch-points
- the very real attrition effect of turning a job into a daily grind
If you’re running a sustainment contract or an infrastructure upgrade job, you already feel this every day. Time is being bled away in traffic, stress levels are rising, and productivity is quietly eroded before work even starts. This isn’t normal operational friction — it’s unmanaged risk baked into the system.
And when US Navy personnel begin rotating through in 2027, that risk will become impossible to hide, turning daily frustration into a public embarrassment for Defence as our most valuable strategic partner arrives to find Australia’s premier naval base still trapped behind a single choke point.
Recommendations
The situation is complex but not hopeless. Here’s a realistic roadmap for resolution.
0–12 months: operational relief (cheap, fast, imperfect)
- shift and access smoothing: negotiated staggered start/finish windows across major employers on-island (Defence + primes + key subcontractors)
- bus/shuttle uplift from mainland park-and-ride to cut single-occupant vehicle volumes at peak
- traffic management upgrades at key bottlenecks (signal timing, turn pockets, incident response protocols) linked to the congestion hotspots already identified by local govenment
- freight scheduling discipline: hard booking windows and off-peak delivery incentives for routine supply runs
1–3 years: targeted capital works (measurable performance improvement)
- intersection and corridor upgrades on the mainland approach routes feeding the causeway (the boring stuff that actually moves the needle)
- resilience works: breakdown bays, managed contraflow procedures, and “single point of failure” response plans for incidents on the causeway approach
- design and approvals for a longer-term second access solution
3–7+ years: strategic access uplift (the only way you get real headroom)
- deliver a second high-reliability access outcome (this might be a revised highway concept, a different corridor treatment, or a staged approach that avoids the impacts that helped kill the prior proposal)
- embed Stirling access into the same seriousness as wharves, power, water, and security upgrades — because it is an enabling system, not a commuting perk
If Canberra wants a simple test: if this were the only road into a major airbase hosting a surge capability, would we accept “daily chaos” as business-as-usual? No. We’d treat it as an operational vulnerability and fund it accordingly.
What WA locals should do: add your name (and make it harder to ignore)
Local councillors and MPs have pushed a formal WA Parliament petition calling for road infrastructure upgrades tied to Garden Island access.
If you work on the island — Defence, prime, SME, or subcontractor — you’re not “getting political” by signing. You’re documenting that an enabling constraint is imposing real cost and risk on a strategic base.
What Canberra stakeholders should do next (instead of watching from afar)
- quantify your own delay cost internally (timesheets, missed windows, overtime, stand-downs) and feed it into project risk registers and contract discussions.
- stop letting this be framed as “Rockingham traffic” — describe it accurately as a resilience issue for Naval capability.
- push for a jointly-owned access plan with staged delivery (immediate relief + funded medium works + committed long-term option), rather than another loop of feasibility theatre.
Author: Darian Macey
Darian is a former Engineering Officer with the RAE with tertiary qualifications in Engineering and Project Management. He is a leading practitioner within Australia's NSI sector with previous employment in Government, project management and building contractor organisations.
