Outback Mayor questions viability behind flying crims more than 900km to coast

Mount Isa’s Mayor Peta MacRae is making a bold call for a jail to be built in her crime-riddled outback city, slamming current solutions as nothing more than a Band-Aid fix. See why.

The Mount Isa Court House. The Mayor has criticised the need to fly alleged Mount Isa based criminals to correctional facilities on the coast, who then may need to be flown back for their matters to be further heard.

Mount Isa Mayor Peta MacRae said a large-scale police operation in her city was only a short-term solution, as she calls for a correctional facility to be built in the remote outback mining city.

“At the moment, we’re just sending our problems somewhere else, like Townsville and Brisbane, and those jobs are staying in those areas where they could very easily be here in our community,” she said.

“It is cheaper to extend an existing facility than build a new one, but I’m just wondering, when they do the economics on that, are they including the planes that are constantly flying back and forth, taking people to detention, taking them to court, and the like.

“My understanding is it costs $3m a year just in police overtime wages, that’s not even the flights, just to be taking people of Mount Isa to detention back to court appearances.”

She also claimed that locked-up Mount Isa criminals were more likely to be rehabilitated if their families could visit them.

Mount Isa Mayor Peta MacRae attending the Bush Summit at The Ville in Townsville. Picture: Chris Burns

Last week in the lead-up to the Courier Mail-Townsville Bulletin Bush Summit, this masthead identified Mount Isa as the crime capital, having outstripped Queensland cities’ crime rate with a per capita of more than 4000 offences per 100,000 people.

On Monday, the Queensland Police Service declared Operation Whiskey Legion would combat domestic violence and property crime until September 4.

She said this data did not reflect the total number of crimes or population.

Mount Isa resident Rodger Winch has fitted his home with security cameras and flood lights due to the amount of crime he has had at his house. Picture: Scott Radford-Chisholm

Ms MacRae was among the four North West mayors who were disillusioned by the ‘lack of outcomes’ from the summit.

One of the issues for Ms MacRae was maintaining the size of the skilled workforce in the mining city.

While it needed to address the crime being caused by a small group of people, it also had to find ways to diversify its workforce so that it did not rely entirely on the mining industry, she said.

Daniel Hodgkinson of Phoenix Security in Mount Isa has seen a huge increase in the amount of crime in the city over the past couple of years. Picture: Scott Radford-Chisholm

The Queensland Government was not considering the proposal, according to Premier Steven Miles, who said the focus on infrastructure was being spent elsewhere.

“We don’t have any active, current plans to look at that,” Mr Miles said at a press conference at the Townsville University Hospital on Monday.

“We have a significant build across the state for both adult correction and youth detention.”

A North West Queensland-based correctional facility has been suggested for years, since at least 2015 when the then-mayor Tony McGrady, a former police minister, claimed the idea was gaining traction.

The front of the Mount Isa Airport.

Ms MacRae said if the centre was built then it would have cost a fraction of what it would now given inflation in the construction industry.

The correctional facility was a proposal reintroduced by consultants, who had been tasked with finding projects to alleviate the loss of 1200 Glencore workers who are expected to be made redundant by the middle of next year.

The State Government offered $20m to fund these projects, but Ms MacRae said a correctional facility would far outstrip that funding.

Ms MacRae said more than $20m would be needed to protect the loss of 1200 jobs in the Mount Isa community.

Originally published as Outback Mayor questions viability behind flying crims more than 900km to coast