Revealed: how Australia’s tourism capital has become an elephant graveyard of waste
Saving our Surfers campaign: The city’s biggest tourism shopfront at Surfers Paradise beach has become an “elephant graveyard of council decorations and rusted memorabilia”. Read the criticism.
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The city’s biggest tourism shopfront at Surfers Paradise beach has become an “elephant graveyard of council decorations and rusted memorabilia”.
Worse still, it is so poorly looked after in some parts, tourists are showering next to smelly rubbish bins.
That’s the blistering critique of the Cavill Mall beach end of the heart of the city by senior councillor Hermann Vorster as council embarks on a $40m first-stage revitalisation project.
Despite pockets of improvement in recent years such as a $35m redevelopment of the Paradise Centre mall, new hospitality venues and a revamped Surfers Paradise Surf Club, Cr Vorster said after a family visit to Surfers Paradise the first priority should be for the tourist suburb to clean up its own backyard at a cheaper cost with better maintenance.
“I could not help but observe that the foreshore is utterly cluttered. We have this Commonwealth Games giant surfboard clock thing plonked on the most expensive real estate in the city that doesn’t even work,” he said.
“We’ve got surfboards, bearing the name of noted surfers - this big art display - that’s not really kept, but again taking up space in the most high-profile real estate in the city.
“We have park furniture that’s just scattered in my view incoherently. There are opportunities for us to refresh Surfers Paradise, by decluttering, cleaning and treating surfaces. And I don’t think we would be spending $40 million - that is the sort of project I’d be prepared to support.”
The Games “countdown clock” was first touted as a “must-do attraction” for the city.
The Bulletin’s own audit of the streets and accompanying photographs show:
* tourists showering beside two large open council bins a block from the beach.
* shop fronts for top clothing outlets covered in black graffiti.
* litter scattered around sidewalks, and long grass growing on the concrete edges.
* filth left outside abandoned businesses along with belongings from the homeless.
Cr Vorster told colleagues he “loved Surfers Paradise” but there had to be a rethink of the “elephant graveyard of council decorations” and new focus on the revitalisation plan after thorough community consultation.
“We should also be open to the issues of Orchid Avenue which I believe are more pronounced than the foreshore. It could be that we have this all back to front,” he said.
Veteran councillor Daphne McDonald agreed, aware of council’s past record of pouring ratepayer money to fix the precinct without the support of property owners.
“Over the years this has always been a problem child,” she said.
Cr McDonald said council had upgraded roads and streetscaping but property owners, some from interstate and others being investors, did not improve their shopfronts.
The buildings had to be improved for council’s work to have a positive impact.
“I’d like a guarantee from those property owners that they are going to upgrade their buildings to match the amount of money put into the streetscaping,” Cr McDonald said.
Cr Vorster believes the State Government should be providing funding after allocating $25m to upgrade the Yeppoon foreshore in 2017.
“If we are the engine room of the tourism economy for the State, surely the State Government should be looking to us to make a similar contribution,” he said.
“Why would we say that we will be putting $90m of impost on the shoulders of ratepayers when we haven’t asked the State Government will they be treating us the same as Yeppoon — it’s absurd.”
But his motion at the most recent full council meeting, to defer an immediate $40 million spend on the $138m planned revitalisation project until debate was held at special budget meetings, was lost on numbers.
Only Deputy Mayor Donna Gates, planning chair Cameron Cameron Caldwell, Pauline Young and Peter Young supported him.
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