Sunshine Coast Hinterland Times

Bob Abbot believes that population growth and related infrastructure problems are central to the coming federal election. He is buoyed up by his inclusion on Federal Labor’s population panel and believes that decentralisation is back on the agenda for handling population growth on both sides of the political divide.

“Decentralisation means regional development”, says Mr Abbot. “Regional development means jobs, lifestyle and the future for regional and rural towns. And that should be high on the agenda for all Australians and for both political parties.”

For the first fifty years of the last century, the Queensland Government not only focussed on, but actually bragged about their decentralisation policy. And they built a very large rail system in Queensland to do exactly that, to decentralise our business. As demographer Bernard Salt said, in the year 1900, 80 per cent of the population lived in regional, rural and remote Australia. In the year 2000 it was only 18 per cent.

I can remember my Grade 6 Social Studies Reader in the Queensland education system, bragging about that theory of decentralisation and showing photos of the trains like the Sunlander and the Westlander.

I firmly believe that the Queensland Government was on the right track in the early days, and the state did value the input from regional communities. But since the 1960s we have forgotten about that. We have focussed 100 per cent on developing the coastline, and very much a part of that is in south-east Queensland. All the rest has been ignored.

When you look at places like Toowoomba for example, where one of the busiest highways in Australia basically runs parallel to the town through a residential area -that should have been removed 20 years ago and it wasn’t.

So they are the kinds of challenges I will be taking to this new task force.