Gold Coast cane fields: Developer Norm Rix tells council to open them up to housing

A leading developer has demanded council open up a key part of the northern Gold Coast to housing to solve a crippling lack of land.

A VETERAN Gold Coast developer says the city has no option but to invade the cane fields in the north to get the suburban housing industry humming again. 

As land stocks run dry, Norm Rix has called for governments to release agricultural land so the city is not locked into purely tower developments while bracing for an extra 350,000 residents by 2041.

Speaking after the loss of 18,000 tradie jobs, Mr Rix also backed calls for incentive schemes and warned the city is facing a building drought without them. 

He called for the council to work proactively to get land in the city’s far north rezoned.

“Council needs to open up more land – there’s land to the west and in the cane fields which could be built on,” he said.

“There are so many people who want to come and build here but they do not have any land.”

The northern cane fields have long been eyed off by developers hoping to secure the giant tracts of land to convert into housing.

Developer Norm Rix. Picture: Jerad Williams.

In 2017 Chinese developer Songcheng, the same company behind a proposal to build a theme park at Carrara, announced plans to spend more than $1 billion to buy up 6117ha of farmland in the Norwell Valley and build a giant masterplanned city.

Cane farmers in the region have spent much of the past decade appealing to successive state governments to rezone the area to allow for upward of 10,000ha of land to be developed. But with the cane fields protected by legislation as agricultural land, there has been no political appetite to change it.

Mr Rix, who once boasted he had knocked down more trees than anyone on the Glitter Strip, said a new incentives program was necessary to revive interest after increased uncertainty.

“The other issue is red tape. If council wants to get more developments going, they need to get back to what they were doing with Kickstart.

“We need incentives to create the jobs necessary to continue building the Gold Coast and keeping our tradies working here. I feel strongly about this because our tradies should not have to be leaving home at 4am to get to work so far away.

“The fact there has been such a tremendous reduction in approvals shows we have to move fast on this one. We cannot gloss over this.”