Big dreams: Theme park founder faced different world

The Longhurst clan has been behind some of the Gold Coast’s most successful business ventures, including Dreamworld, Riviera and the Boat Works.

Dreamworld founder John Longhurst.

The Longhurst clan has been behind some of the Gold Coast’s most successful business ventures, including Dreamworld, Riviera and the Boat Works.

But one has to wonder whether the Longhursts would have been as successful if they had to start from scratch today, given the red tape and bureaucracy facing businesses today.

The family, who last week were inducted into the Queensland Business Leaders Hall of Fame, got its big break in the early 1980s when late patriarch John Longhurst bought 85 hectares of land in “the middle of nowhere’’ beside the Pacific Motorway at Coomera. He had a dream of building a theme park founded on similar design concepts as Disneyland.

But as son Rod Longhurst told the awards night at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre it was a different time for entrepreneurs who had big ideas.

“Dad was stressed it took 45 days to get zoning approval,” Rod said. “And the entire development application was only a page and a quarter.”

John Longhurst also collected cars and owned a Model T Ford Photo: Des Houghton

These days zonings and development applications can take years, run into hundreds of pages and cost millions. And it’s not just red tape that is clogging things up. “It used to take an hour to get from the Gold Coast to Brisbane on a two-lane road,” Rod said. “Now it is four lanes but takes two and a half hours.”

Rod said his dad, who died in 2022, faced a lot of naysayers, many who said Dreamworld would never work. But as we all know it was a runaway success from day one.

“He was convinced that Australia could create world-class services and products,” he said. That philosophy has clearly been handed down with Rod Longhurst’s Riviera producing arguably the best luxury yachts in the world.

We hear the low-profile Longhurst brothers were not keen on picking up their gong last week and only agreed if the spotlight could be on the legacy of their dad.

Sand castle

The battle is over in the sand dunes of Far North Queensland. Brisbane-based silica sand miner Diatreme Resources announced on July 24 it had reached the key 90 per cent level of acceptances from rival Metallica Minerals shareholders as part of its hostile takeover bid.

That threshold allows Diatreme to move to compulsory acquisition of the remaining Metallica shares. Diatreme’s share price has rocketed up 76 per cent over the past month.

Diatreme’s sand reserves at Cape Flattery.

The company’s market value has now swollen to more than $130 million, with the combination of the two North Queensland miners creating the ASX’s largest miner of high purity silica sand, an essential ingredient for solar panels.

“The combined value of the two companies is bigger than the sum of its parts and the market is now reflecting this,” says Diatreme’s chief executive Neil McIntyre. “This is just the start of the real value journey, as we look to unlock group synergies and significant shareholder value from the combined group.”

Pumped up

Brisbane-based sportswear brand LSKD is preparing this week to open an outlet at Westfield Warringah Mall, its 13th store and its first in Sydney’s Northern Beaches. LSKD founder and chief executive Jason Daniel says the team is pumped to open a store in the Northern Beaches. “Our team has worked incredibly hard behind the scenes to bring this store to life,” says Daniel. “In the lead-up to the opening, we’ve already been connecting with the Northern Beaches fitness community,” says Daniel.