Remember when: Mothers were concerned over red tape strangling a childcare centre project

RED tape was said to be strangling the development of a $250,000 Gold Coast City Council childcare centre at Southport.

Gold Coast Bulletin June 5, 1975 front page.

Gold Coast Bulletin, Thursday June 5, 1975

RED tape was said to be strangling the development of a $250,000 Gold Coast City Council childcare centre at Southport.

The centre, which was to be developed on a prime block of real estate on Bauer St was to be the Gold Coast’s first council-owned childcare facility upon completion.

But the question Gold Coast parents were asking was — when would it be built?

The council reply in effect was: when we can cut through all the red tape and secure final approval from State authorities.

The project was born in controversy when the council first bought the Bauer St land for $109,000.

Critics claimed the price was too high to pay for a community welfare scheme which could easily have been sited on less expensive real estate somewhere else in the city.

Gold Coast Bulletin June 5, 1975 front page.

But working mothers — who lost the services of an all-day childcare service when the Sundale child minding centre closed down in September 1973 — hugged their children with delight.

However they said they were becoming increasingly worried about: the delay in going ahead of the Bauer St project and the inadequacy of a “temporary childcare centre” which had opened 20 months earlier in an old Heath St house at the back of Sundale.

Meanwhile, the Bulletin’s front page bore a photo of the site where the $5.9 million Advancetown Dam, later known as Hinze Dam was under construction.