Gary Baildon: Former Gold Coast mayor’s decades of services to the community

The curtain will this month come down on a career of public service which stretches back more than 30 years. This is the story of Gary Baildon.

THE curtain will this month come down on a career of public service which stretches back more than 30 years.

Gary Baildon will retire as the councillor for Surfers Paradise on March 28 after a final four year stint at city hall.

Cr Baildon, now 80, who served three terms as Gold Coast mayor and says he is looking forward to taking things easier.

Gary Baildon will retire at the end of the month. Picture: Jerad Williams

Born in Nambour in 1939, Gary Baildon moved to the Gold Coast in the 1960s and became a well-known business figure in Surfers Paradise.

He’d already been a frequent visitor as a teenager while still living in Brisbane.

“In the late 1950s I would come down. I’d catch a lift with someone to Surfers Paradise, go for a swim, get changed and then hitchhike back,” he said

Operating a news agency in the heart of the Glitter Strip, he witnessed the area’s dramatic changes.

Gary Baildon in Surfers Paradise.

“I remember going to the Surfers Paradise beer garden for lunch where Stan Bourne and his band would play each day and he would always open with the same line, ‘Hi folks, my name is Bourne, I was born Bourne and I’m still Bourne’,” Cr Baildon told the Bulletin last year.

“Then there was Cherokee Bill Mitter. There was one famous day where he dressed up in his Native American outfit and rode his horse into a bar. There were many more like Oskar Safier, Laddie the Log and John Patterson, who was the suntan man before Al Baldwin.”

In 1988, then-Surfers Paradise councillor Lex Bell announced he would contest the mayoralty against incumbent Denis Pie, freeing up a seat on the council.

Cr Bell encouraged the businessman to run in his seat, which he successfully won.

Mayor Gary Baildon before amalgamation.

The newly minted city councillor served two terms, during which the Gold Coast witnessed dramatic changes.

The fallout of the 1990 “recession we had to have” hit the economy hard as the Japanese property boom fell away while political leaders spent much of their time focused on a controversial plan which would change the council forever.

In 1991 the State Government proposed that Gold Coast and Albert Shire councils merge to form a single “super council”.

Despite significant opposition from councillors, the decision was made by the Goss Government in 1994.

Cr Baildon (centre) after being elected Mayor for the first time in March 1994.

That year also saw a big change – Cr Bell stood down as mayor and decided to run for his old Surfers Paradise council seat, while Cr Baildon successful ran for the mayoralty.

But the amalgamation decision meant Gold Coasters were forced back to the polls in 1995 and Cr Baildon was not so lucky, losing the mayoral chains to rival Ray Stevens, the former Albert Shire mayor.

But after two years in the wilderness, Cr Baildon bounced back and return to city hall in 1997 as mayor.

It was that year he achieved what he today names as his greatest legacy – approving the funding for a study into what became the light rail system.

But after being successfully re-elected in 2000, he found himself at odds with several powerful business figures over the need to revamp Surfers Paradise.

After a sustained campaign against him, Cr Baildon lost the mayoral office again at the 2004 election to Ron Clarke.

But this wasn’t the end – He returned to his newsagency and became the head of the Gold Coast Show.

In 2012 he was named the chairman of the Gold Coast Waterways Authority, a post he held until late 2015.

A year later Cr Baildon made a shock comeback, winning his old Surfers Paradise seat one last time.