Ground broken on Wangetti Trail, tourism minister commits to new completion time
Works have begun on a southern, 7.8km section of the state government’s flagship eco-tourism project, the Wangetti Trail, three years after construction was originally meant to start.
Cairns
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Shovels have finally hit the ground on the Wangetti Trail but the government’s new project completion date of 2026 has conflicted with background briefings to stakeholders.
The Wangetti Trail is a hotly anticipated, $47m eco-tourism project that is planned to stretch 94km from Palm Cove to Port Douglas.
The track, which is divided into three sections, has been billed since 2018 as a combined walking and mountain biking trail that the Department of Tourism has said will deliver hundreds of millions of dollars to the Far North economy and create 150 jobs.
But the project has been beset by a series of delays, setbacks and, as the Cairns Post revealed in April, shifted goalposts due to alleged disputes between the government’s tourism and environment departments over final trail design.
The Department of Tourism denied infighting had caused any delays and instead cited the project’s technical complexity.
Tourism minister Stirling Hinchliffe, standing beside Djabugay Native Title claimants and local politicians, turned the first sod on a 7.8km snippet of the trail on Wednesday morning.
“Cairns is already recognised as a world-class mountain bike adventure destination, and we see Wangetti Trail building on that reputation on our runway to the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games,” Mr Hinchliffe said.
“Building trails of the calibre of Wangetti takes meticulous planning with a project half the size in Tasmania talking a decade to become shovel-ready.”
The first piece – known as Stage 1, which sits within the trail’s southern section – is planned for construction between Palm Cove and Ellis Beach and, according to Mr Hinchliffe, will be complete by the third quarter of 2024.
Stage 1 sits on Transport and Main Roads land and outside any area still subject of Indigenous Land Use Agreement negotiations.
When asked why the fist 7.8km would take 12 months to build, Mr Hinchliffe said expected unfavourable conditions during the 2023/24 wet season had been factored into the timeline.
“(The wet season) is a challenging time to do construction work in this part of the world,” he said.
Wednesday’s announcement is the first for the Wangetti Trail in almost two years.
Construction was first due to begin in 2020 and a “progressive opening” penned for 2022.
Local tourism specialists decried the lost earnings for local businesses due by the delay and mountain biking stakeholders had begun to write the project off.
Mr Hinchliffe said the government was now committed to delivering the entire dual-use trail by 2026.
But a tourism department representative told Cairns Regional Council in an April briefing that the entire trail would take “2000 days”, or five-and-a-half years, to complete.
When asked about this, Mr Hinchliffe remained firm that the estimate for completion was 2026.
“Of course there are impacts that weather and supply issues might have,” he said.
The project’s budget has also been a growing pain for the government.
In 2018 is was $21m.
It more than doubled over five years to $47.1m.
Statements by the tourism department to an industry reference group in July 2022 indicated just the southern section of the trail, the only one so far put to tender, was going to cost $30m, according to documents seen by the Cairns Post.
Mr Hinchliffe said $3m had already been spent on the project, and the government would stick to its current budget.
“The entire project remains at the $47.1m; that’s what we’ll continue to work within,” he said.
Almost all of the trail is subject to an Indigenous Land Use Agreement between the government and Djabugay Native Title claimants.
Stakeholders at Wednesday’s sod turning expressed confidence that ILUA negotiations would be finalised soon, with an agreement signed off by the end of the year.
“It’s a great new beginning … but you cannot have a trail going across our country, the Djabugay claim area, without its people,” Gavin Singleton, one of several Djabugay Nations spokespersons, said.
“The time is right where you have all of our families involved in this project. It’s an opportunity for us to share our story as people travel across this world heritage area.”
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Originally published as Ground broken on Wangetti Trail, tourism minister commits to new completion time
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