Gold Coast development: State Cabinet backed 1989 push for $120m marina-resort and golf course on South Stradbroke Island
State Cabinet approved in-principle a complex $120 million marina-resort and golf course at Couran on South Stradbroke Island. But not everyone was impressed.
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STATE Cabinet approved in-principle a complex $120 million marina-resort and golf course at Couran on South Stradbroke Island.
That was the front page news Gold Coasters were greeted with 30 years ago this week as the Ahern Government pushed forward with a new tourism project for the city region.
Three decades later the city is in the middle of a pitched debate over the need for new tourism products which could be used to market the city at a time when the Federal Government is sandbagging against a shaky global economy.
The Gold Coast is also currently debating the future of The Spit, with a recent masterplan unveiled, showing off resorts, shopping centres and promenades.
Many of these features were also to be included in the 1989 Stradbroke Island proposal, which was put forward by businessman Les Ward’s Pacific Ventures.
The development was to be known as Port Livistona and was to feature a 130ha golf course, resort and marina, with Broadwater frontage, adjacent to the old canal development at Couran and alongside 80ha privately owned by the Bruce Small Group.
The company’s financial director, Gerry Lambert, told the Bulletin that the island would become home to a three-storey, 300-room resort hotel and convention centre, a 400-berth marina with 5ha of sheltered anchorage and beach access for small boats.
The land for the project was set to be leased to the development from the Government.
Its elements were to include:
• A boardwalk promenade linking major elements of the resort include 120 condominiums, shops, a tavern and information centre operated by the National Parks and Wildlife Service.
• Accommodation for 100 staff.
• Three newly created ‘wavebreak islands’ which were to be created in the Broadwater opposite the marina.
The developer would have been forced to spend $1.2 million to fund upgrades on the island as well as donate two properties – one in Thrushton and the other in Idalia in western Queensland to become national parks.
Environment Minister Geoff Muntz told the Bulletin a deal was not far off while the Queensland Conservation Council welcomed the announcement.
But council co-ordinator Liz Bourne warned that the project’s size needed to be limited to prevent overdevelopment.
Northern Gold Coast MP Ivan Gibbs declared the project to be the “largest nature conservation initiative” since the Cap York national park consolidation of the 1970s.
But Mr Gibbs insisted that it would be the last major development allowed on the island and that the government did not support a proposal put forward by Mirage Group for either a public or private golf club on the island’s southern end.
By 1990 the Albert Shire Council approved the project but a change in government at the state level caused problems.
The National Party Government lost power in December 1989 and the Wayne Goss-led Labor administration dumped an agreement to call the development an environmental park.
Instead the developer said it would look at a more commercial development.
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“The government may think it is able to wave away several years of hard work and intricate planning which would have saved South Stradbroke from environmental rape, but out here in the business world there are obligations to shareholders and necessities for return on investment which must be met,’’ Mr Lambert said.
“The government’s lack of concern about South Stradbroke has forced us, and now the Albert Shire Council, into a developmental corner.”
Ultimately the project never went ahead.
In the late 1990s Olympic legend and future Gold Coast Mayor Ron Clarke successfully led the development of Couran Cove, an environmentally centre development which continues to operate on South Stradbroke Island today.
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