Demographer Simon Kuestenmacher warns the place has been “procrastinating” since he told leaders two years ago at Future Gold Coast to build infrastructure beyond what was immediately needed now or even in the future.

He is particularly concerned about the public transport extension stalling and congestion-busting infrastructure going ahead - warning stuffing it up in the fast-growing Gold Coast is a “death sentence”.

The city was also heading towards a midlife crisis given its growth and must establish its identity leading into the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games across south-east Queensland, he says.

Mr Kuestenmacher said: “All eyes, all focus of the (LNP) must be on Queensland and the narrative over the next three or four years must be ‘we get stuff done’.

“It must be ‘we are managing this much better financially responsible, but we get stuff built left, right and centre’ and that’s some sort of narrative that I want to see from the (LNP).

“This is a political death sentence if screwing this up.”

THE WARNING

Mr Kuestenmacher could not have been clearer when he spoke to Gold Coast city leaders three years ago at Future Gold Coast.

The Demography Group founder and co-director was the keynote speaker at the 2022 event and told the audience the 2032 Games was a “golden opportunity”.

He said the city had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to build the infrastructure it needs to grow into a city of more than one million people potentially within the next decade.

From light and heavy rail through to major community infrastructure projects, he urged council, state and federal government politicians to put “everything on the table”.

“The Olympics have to be used to bring infrastructure spending forward because there is a brief window when this will be possible and it opened last year when the Olympic Games was won but it must be grasped,” he said in November 2022.

“There is no wiggle room here and there is a deadline here so if infrastructure needs to be built, the time is now because there is no such thing as trying to time it right, you need to build it right now.

“The important thing is creating regional infrastructure at scale right now and this is about the big picture, so it isn’t important which routes they take. They just need to be built.”

Mr Kuestenmacher gave the audience a warning: The window for building the critical infrastructure was going to be brief.

“(Regarding light rail and route concerns), all those little fights need to be put aside, you need to build it now, build it fast and get it down to the airport because the window of opportunity will soon close.”

So how have we done in the past three years?

“This is your fantastic chance to catch up on infrastructure and (in the past) three years, you’ve just procrastinated,” he said.

“That’s fine, we all are procrastinators at heart, but sooner or later we must actually get going, get digging, get building, and that is now.”

THE OPPORTUNITY

Fast-forward to today and there’s been no progress on locking in funding for the future stages of the city’s light rail network, with a state government review of the project still underway,

Instead, the Munich-born social researcher returns to the city as the keynote speaker of this year’s Future Gold Coast forum on July 25 to find a region in flux.

In 2023 he urged the Gold Coast to follow the example of German city Munich which hosted the 1972 Games.

After winning the Games in the mid-1960s, its politicians spent millions to build its railway network and revamp the still-damaged World War II-era infrastructure into a modern city capable of hosting a major sporting event.

Instead he finds a city grappling with its own identity, what it wants for the future, how it will deal with the massive population growth and how it can evolve beyond being known as the “Glitter Strip”.

“My main argument is that the Gold Coast, well and truly is at an inflection point in history, I would actually think a bit more of a midlife crisis,” he said

The idea of just being a satellite city of Brisbane, with a bit of a ‘Glitter Strip’ narrative attached to it, is long gone.

“The Gold Coast very much is a city in its own right and it is now part of this big place that is South-east Queensland that many urban geographers, town planners would actually not view as separate cities but would view as one big ecosystem increasingly.

“If we look at southeast Queensland, it has the potential to become the best-connected location in this country, massively outperforming Sydney and Melbourne

“This can be by far the most interesting area, region in this country but the big challenge is that you need to provide very good connectivity between the individual hubs, Gold Coast, Brisbane, Sunshine Coast, and all the way out to the west. But like every region in the country, it has 20 years worth of infrastructure backlog.

“We don’t have enough infrastructure to actually reach our best fullest capacity and that sounds depressing at first, but then we remember the Olympic Games, which is never really attracted to the region as just the sporting event but mostly as an excuse to get infrastructure developed, and this is largely about the connectivity between those individual hubs that make up the region.”

THE SLIM WINDOW

The 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games are now less than seven years away and the clock is rapidly ticking on the opportunity to get shovels in the ground on key infrastructure projects in order to have them ready.

Among key projects Gold Coast civic leaders say must be completed by the 2032 Games are Stage 4 of the light rail - connecting Burleigh Heads to the border via Gold Coast Airport - east-west rapid bus lines linking trams on the coastal strip to heavy rail and the $350m, 12,000-seat arena in Southport. That project has been earmarked as critical Games infrastructure with potential to host muliple major sports including basketball.

These are three major projects, which must occur simultaneously with the billions of dollars worth of new Games infrastructure across the state, including an athletes village at Royal Pines.

And there’s not enough tradies locally, with the state government already vowing to pull talent from across the country to bolster its builder ranks.

Mr Kuestenmacher said the next three years would be the most important in this century because it would be then that the infrastructure which will power the city for decades to come will be built – or scrapped forever.

“We are seven years out of the Olympic Games and that means you probably have about two to three years max to get all of those projects shovel ready and if they’re not ready by then, it will not be built,” he said.

“ I would argue, without sounding too dramatic, that this makes the next two to three years the single most important years in Queensland’s century.

 “There’s a certain kind of sense of urgency – you must build now and that ultimately unlocks yet another stage of urban development and that leads to this identity crisis, the midlife crisis that I allude to here.

“Who are we? What kind of stereotypes do we want to have associated with the region?”

THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

The first elements of the city date back nearly 170 years but the region only became known as the Gold Coast in the early 1960s.

The following decades, built on a legacy of sun, sand, surf and tourism, grew to become Australia’s top travel destination.

But with that, the city gained the occasionally pejorative sobriquet the “Glitter Strip” - loved by some, hated by others - for the high-rise towers from Main Beach to Broadbeach, Meter Maids and colourful white shoe-wearing developers who made it happen.

Those days are long gone along with golden bikini-clad Meter Maids and their akubra hats - but the name has stuck around, for better or worse. But should it be done away with if it no longer matches the modern Gold Coast of today.

Mr Kuestenmacher says the Gold Coast’s identity can evolve while retaining the old chutzpah – just like Munich did when becoming a modern engineering centre, balancing ‘laptops and lederhosen’.

“The Glitter Strip thing, of course, is a bit of a cheapening of the narrative which is something people from Sydney and Melbourne say so they can look down from their high horse,” he said.

“I’m from Munich in Germany originally and Bavaria was, for a long time, a big agricultural region in Germany but now it’s an engineering hotspot with companies like Siemens and BMW, now there.

“About 25 years ago the area reinvented itself and they came up with this idea of becoming the tech and biotech centre of Germany and so the big rebranding campaign that they launched was called Laptop and Lederhosen.

“It very much pushed the idea of retaining our traditional, maybe a bit tacky, Lederhosen, cliche narrative while we step forward, because you can hold two identities.

“You do not have to pick and choose, but (the Gold Coast) does need to position itself deliberately.

“You can call this whatever you want – bikinis and blockchains, Coasts and codes, thongs and think tanks. Take your pick.”   

Editor’s note: The Bulletin acknowledges the Future Gold Coast sponsors for supporting this important series and notes sponsors have no control over the content or views expressed.