Opinion: Church, state should come together on infrastructure issues

A priest whose flock sold its church to the government has backed a planned housing solution, but there’s no response from church or state.

Father Dan Hobbs in a chapel with stained-glass at the Anglicare residential aged care home.

A priest who persuaded his dwindling flock to sell its church is urging others to do the same.

Father Dan Hobbs had the backing of his last 12 parishioners when they asked the Anglican synod to allow them to sell their beloved St Paul’s to Manly State School next door.

This week I peered into the window at defunct St Paul’s to see the church being converted into a performing arts centre and meeting space for the school.

“It was the right thing to do. The school was overcrowded and had nowhere to expand,” Hobbs said.

He believes churches throughout Australia should surrender their surplus land and buildings for affordable housing, for aged care homes, daycare centres and schools.

Hobbs, 43, a trained journalist and former conservative political apparatchik, said generations of people of faith had built churches that were now a wonderful community asset to share.

His parishioners agreed that Manly State School in bayside Brisbane could make better use of the church and the land.

Hobbs wants to see more church land unlocked to help ease the housing crisis that has hit low-income workers the most.

He backs the multi-faith coalition of churches and charitable organisations willing to surrender unused land for small-scale affordable housing projects for battlers.

Queensland churches and not-for-profit groups have already offered to use their land to build affordable homes for up to 50,000 people, maybe more.

So why has the state government failed to embrace this kind offer?

Housing Minister Meaghan Scanlon should provide an update. So should State Development Minister Grace Grace, whose responsibilities cover Economic Development Queensland, the government planning and property agency.

St Paul's Church at Manly. Picture: Kgbo/Wikimedia Commons

As the biggest landowner in Brisbane, the Catholic Archdiocese should also provide an update. It has offered spare land but won’t say where, and the archbishop’s office refuses requests for interviews.

It is known the Brisbane Catholic Archdiocese and The Salvation Army are offering 15 sites immediately to the Queensland government to ease housing stress. But they have hundreds more sites, enough for thousands of dwellings.

Hobbs, who is married with a son and a daughter, was educated at Toowoomba’s prestigious Catholic college Downlands, yet converted to Anglicanism as a young man.

Later, he was “called” to the priesthood after a visit to the tomb of St Francis of Assisi in Assisi in Umbria, 180km north of Rome, while on holiday there.

He was sent to Manly in 2019 and quickly realised the parish was in trouble.

“It became apparent pretty quickly that the parish was not numerically or financially viable,” he said.

“The parish came to its own decision – with me – that they couldn’t do it anymore.

“We didn’t have enough humans and we didn’t have enough dosh.”

Many, many churches throughout the nation would be in the same position, he said.

“The decision to sell came after a lot of consultation over two years with lots of cups of tea, lots of explanations and lots of teaching elderly women how to read a profit and loss statement,” he said.

“My view was it is their money not mine, so they had to make the decision.”

The school was keen to expand, and the headmaster alerted Education Queensland that the property was up for grabs.

“The site included the church, the rectory, the office and the shed and car parks,” Hobbs said.

“It’s all their property now.’’

And the transfer is perhaps a model for all churches.

“There is land sitting around doing nothing that could absolutely be used to do something missional,” he said.

“It has to be. At the end of the day people of faith, regardless of denomination, have a spiritual duty to help.’’

The St Paul’s worshippers did not miss out. Hobbs conducts services for them, and others, in a lovely chapel with stained-glass at the Anglicare residential aged care home less than 1km away in Oceana Terrace.

Manly State School | Picture: Brisbane City Council

Let me go off on a tangent here and say the centrepiece of the Anglicare home is the heritage-listed Lota House built from 1865 and gifted to the church by the descendants of the Irish-born pastoral family that built it.

Hobbs grew up at Inglewood on the Darling Downs where his father was a nurse and his mother an early childhood educator. “I was raised a Roman Catholic. My mum’s family is all Italian, so I didn’t really have much choice in the matter,” he says.

“In my mid-twenties I converted to Anglicanism. It was a personal choice. I felt more at home there spiritually.

“At the time I found Anglican parishes to be more welcoming and I found the theology taught in those Anglican churches to be more aligned with how I understood the nature
of God.

“I wasn’t against anyone or anything (in the Catholic Church), I just felt more at home in the Anglican tradition.”

His life changed as he “said a little prayer” at the St Francis of Assisi tomb. “I suddenly felt a great sense of purpose and had a call in my heart.”

On the flight home he awoke from a nap and told his wife: “I think God wants me to be ordained.

“I think I am being called to the priesthood.

“She is a good central Queensland country girl and she said, ‘go back to sleep you fool’.’’

He went back to work. “But God keeps knocking.’’

He turned his back on a successful career to enrol at St Francis Theological College in Milton, the Anglican seminary in Brisbane where he was ordained.

Housing Minister Meaghan Scanlon

WHISTLEBLOWER OF THE YEAR

Straight-shooting Dr Pamela Swepson from Kenmore in Brisbane’s west has been worried about the spread of fire ants for two decades.

She was seconded to the Queensland Department of Primary Industries to help implement the National Fire Ant Eradication Program when it was launched.

“In 20 years, they have spent a billion dollars and the problem is 20 times worse,” she told me. She didn’t like what she saw and early on made a public interest disclosure that the program was allegedly misreporting its success.

Her PID, like a thousand of others made by Queensland whistleblowers, was ignored.

The Queensland Whistleblowers Action Group honoured Ms Swepson this week by naming her whistleblower of the year.

Action group secretary, Greg McMahon, said Swepson had bravely stuck to her guns amid attempts to denigrate her.

He said the state government failed to fix broken whistleblower laws by not implementing the recommendations from the Wilson Review a year ago.

At the time, Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath said it was a “game changing review that will give whistleblowers more protections and, ultimately, the confidence to come forward”.

What a laugh.

IRRITANT OF THE WEEK

Steven Miles. The Premier shows poor leadership by failing to sack incompetent Minister for Energy, Renewables and Hydrogen and Minister for Public Works, Mick de Brenni, who still won’t accept blame for the Callide Power Station debacle. Under Westminster tradition the buck stops with you, minister.