FNQ Regional Plan: Why outdated growth scheme needs desperate fix
Old, stifling and unsupportive – three words that describe both a pair of threadbare leather budgie smugglers and the critical plan that drives our region’s growth.
Cairns
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OLD, stifling and unsupportive – three words that perfectly describe a pair of threadbare leather budgie smugglers stretched to the point of utter pulverisation.
Unfortunately, they are also the very adjectives that best sum up the State Government’s uncomfortably tight and outdated plan for Far North Queensland.
The current FNQ Regional Plan is 12 years old – the oldest in Queensland, and written before two important new planning acts were introduced.
A formal review was due in 2019 but instead the region was left clutching its feathers while Wide Bay Burnett scored a review despite its plan being two years younger.
It means the key document used to direct growth in Far North Queensland is an antiquated mess that ignores economic shifts that have occurred over the past decade and a bit.
FNQ Regional Organisation of Councils executive officer Darlene Irvine believed the government was currently considering whether the Far North or the Darling Downs should be next for review.
She wanted the oldest plan to be given priority.
“As it stands, the state has no strategic plan for the region,” she said.
“The existing plan is old, stifling growth and has no state accountability, monitoring or evaluation.”
Conversely, Townsville has a current plan that identifies five catalytic projects focusing on renewable hydrogen, defence, agribusiness, advanced manufacturing and tourism.
It touches on building a future rapid transport link, expanding land-based aquaculture industries, better addressing regional economic resilience to climate change, and opportunities for major defence operations linked with the Australian-Singapore Military Training Initiative.
It is the kind of up-to-date, long-term thinking Mayor Bob Manning wants up here.
Cairns Regional Council added its voice to the mix after voting on Wednesday to make a formal request for a review.
Cr Manning said the city needed to make its voice heard loudly in Brisbane.
“Regional plans are meant to make regions more prosperous, more able to attract investment than they’re able to now,” he said.
“You don’t attract people to make investment and then frustrate them from making that investment … so the State Government needs to look at how it can better balance investment that occurs within various regional areas.”
The alternative is to sit and wait for the inevitable eruption when growth reaches a critical mass in all the wrong places in a region hamstrung by political inertia.
“We’re clearly going back to the days when FNQ used to refer to Forgotten North Queensland,” Division 1 councillor Brett Moller said.
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Originally published as FNQ Regional Plan: Why outdated growth scheme needs desperate fix
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