THINK TANK: Gold Coast long-time businessman Frank Goldstein speaks out about the city

LONG-TIME Gold Coast businessman Frank Goldstein wants to see the Coolangatta and Brisbane airports linked by rapid heavy rail — what do you think?

Frank Goldstein with a special cake made for the 70th year celebration of the business, at Surfers Paradise, Gold Coast.

Looking after a family business that’s older than he is has taught Frank Goldstein a lot about people and business. To boost both, he believes the Brisbane and Gold Coast airports must be connected by fast heavy rail.

BIOGRAPHY:

Frank Goldstein had bypass surgery at 44, so it feels somewhat serendipitous that I am talking to him at his Goldsteins store at 44 Frank St. He assures me his heart condition was genetic, not pastry-related, and the 71-year-old owner of the Coast’s most well-known businesses certainly looks and sounds the picture of health. Mr Goldstein is just one year older than the business named Busy Bee bakery founded by his parents Julius and Paula in 1944. The first store bearing the Goldsteins name opened two years later in East Berlin at the end of World War II. Frank’s parents brought every living relative with them when they moved to Australia, giving them work and a place to live until they could find their feet. Continental Cakes opened on the Gold Coast in 1957 — and Frank now oversees the company’s 15 stores alongside a third generation of Goldsteins — his sons Joshua and Martin.

THINK TANK:

What do you love about the Gold Coast?

“I love the weather — not that I’ve lived everywhere else, but everyone who comes here on holidays falls in love with it because of the weather, and the mildness of our winters.

“And the pace, which used to be much slower, but is quickening up.”

What do you think can be done better on the Gold Coast?

“Unfortunately, our rapid transport hasn’t turned out to be very rapid, it’s a slow tram and I’m a bit disappointed in that.

“I think we could have joined the 21st century with rapid transport.

“Surfers Paradise today is not what it used to be in terms of trams going through the centre of town — I think they’ve botched that up a lot with posts in the middle of the street and traffic lights everywhere.

“They go through there at just over a walking pace so why spoil the street with all those poles — it’s not what I consider a relaxing atmosphere.”

In your travels, what have you seen being done elsewhere you think could work well here?

“At all signals, in Poland and many other places in Europe, they have displays of countdown on the lights that tell you whether that light is going to change in five seconds or 10 seconds before you get to an amber light.

“Here, sometimes if you happen to be focusing somewhere on the road you might not be able to see it quickly enough and you might not be able to visually see it.

“If everybody knew there was a countdown system on it, it really works well, I found that very user-friendly.

“Also, we’ve got these big road signs, put up by Main Roads, usually warning people about different things — I’d really like to see courtesy brought in as a number-one importance for people driving on the roads.

“We never see a sign up encouraging that.

“It really makes your day when someone gives you a wave — that’s what tourism is all about.”

If money, time, laws and approvals were no issue, what is one big project you’d undertake tomorrow?

“We’ve got two international airports only 100km at most away from each other — I’d like to see them connected by heavy rail as soon as we could and improve the speed of that rail because we would become the mecca of tourism from Asia.

“In any sort of bad weather there’d be no doubt about whether they’d be allowed to get here or not.

“You could land at Coolangatta, you could land in Brisbane and we would have failure-proof two international airports and it would really give us a really strong pull because our bread and butter’s coming from international travel now.

“The more we can do and the more airlines that fly into the Gold Coast, the more we’re going to become the hub.

“I’d like to see the new Gold Coast hospital on the map as the centre of excellence when it comes to it being a hub of knowledge, friendship and goodwill to all our South-East Asian neighbours.

“There’s a lot of medical tourism going on in the United States where people go to a particular town which is famous for cancer research, so they go there for holidays while their siblings or parents are undergoing medical treatment and there’s certainly a big gap here for that.”

What conversations should Gold Coast’s movers and shakers be having?

“I think there’s a lack of government willingness to give a cost-benefit analysis on the dollars we spend in the public arena.

“I don’t believe we get good value for the dollars that we spend on different projects.

“We should have a special body that monitors these things and pulls them out of the political football game of who’s doing the best and who’s created the most jobs.

“The creators of the jobs are the people in business, who are capable of employing more people, setting higher standards for our workers, caring for them in such a way that they feel wanted, loved and part of the community and involving them in the sort of things that make families a better and stronger identity to the whole community.”