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How a shotgun marriage has helped make this ‘city’ bigger than Canberra or Tassie

The Moreton Bay region wants to be known as more than the bit you drive through travelling between Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast. Craig Johnstone explains.

Jul 25, 2022, updated Jul 25, 2022
The population of the Moreton Bay region is expected to grow by about 300,000 over the next 20 years. Photo: MBRC

The population of the Moreton Bay region is expected to grow by about 300,000 over the next 20 years. Photo: MBRC

It’s not hard to see why the Moreton Bay region is going through a bit of an identity crisis.

It is a place where the sum perhaps adds up to less than its parts, with its lack of a distinctive business centre and unwieldy boundaries making it difficult to imagine a common regional or urban character.

Moreton Bay Regional Council has decided that to tackle this issue properly it needs to campaign to officially become a “city” in the eyes of the state government.

This campaign comes 14 years after the Moreton Bay region was created by shoving together a couple of previously separate shires and then forcing them to swallow up the previous City of Redcliffe in the bargain.

That Pine Rivers Shire and Caboolture Shire were both economically larger than Redcliffe at the time only served to make the process more difficult to digest. So did the Beattie government’s insistence that there be no forced job losses during the transition, meaning the new council had to work out what to do with three head librarians, three chief engineers and so on.

But that was then. Moreton Bay is often cited as the local government that has fared best from council amalgamations, not least because it went from a region of smaller separate shires with competing agendas to the third largest local government area in Australia, behind Brisbane and the Gold Coast, and soon to have a population larger than Tasmania’s.

This year, the council brought down an $816 million budget, including a $259 million capital works program. It is absorbing much of the state’s population growth and, with the new Caboolture West satellite city local plan, is at the cutting edge of the Palaszczuk Government’s effort to manage urban development more effectively.

And yet, Mayor Peter Flannery is having to explain to some politicians and policy makers interstate where Moreton Bay is. Hence the move to convince the Local Government Change Commission that is is time Moreton Bay was called a city.

“By definition we are already a city, our population is already bigger than Canberra, but we are missing out on funding because politicians have mistaken our region for being a regional centre,” he said.

“The growth challenge ahead here is real, it’s here, and as much as we might like to pretend it’s not happening – the truth is that ignoring reality won’t make it go away.”

Flannery insists the planning mistakes interstate in places like Parramatta hold lessons for Moreton Bay.

“At this junction in time the best thing for the people of Moreton Bay is to really think strategically about the future and speak with one voice, so that council is in the best position to campaign for your taxes to be reinvested back here by the state and federal Governments,” he said.

Queensland councils, while playing their politics hard, have avoided going down the rabbit hole of party politics (Brisbane is the big exception) or fringe causes. No local government in Queensland, for example, has bothered to join the push by some councils in other states to campaign for a Palestinian state or abandon Australia Day celebrations as a gesture of solidarity with First Nations peoples.

From the smallest council to the largest, the main game has been economic development and financial sustainability – two goals that do not lend themselves to misty-eyed pledges to right the world’s social wrongs.

The Moreton Bay region has been on a political rollercoaster ride over the past decade, winning some major infrastructure commitments like the Kippa Ring rail link but also attracting heat from some circles for the way it did business.

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A relentless pursuit of former mayor Alan Sutherland and other councillors by the Crime and Corruption Commission ultimately came to nothing and, unlike some other SEQ councils, it has largely kept its nose clean regarding integrity issues.

Its chief executive, Greg Chemello, is a former senior state government planning bureaucrat who breaks the mould of the traditionally risk-averse council boss by making no secret of his desire to ensure the region goes places.

The council wants Moreton Bay to be seen as a “polycentric” city, a la New York or London, with multiple yet connected urban centres.

It has no time to waste.

“If Council do not progress a reclassification submission before August 2022, it is probable that Council will not be able to revisit this initiative until the beginning of 2025,” papers backing its renaming policy state.

“By that time the recent SEQ City Deal momentum may have been lost and the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games will only be seven years away.”

While it admits the pursuit of city status is not “top of mind” for residents, there remains an urgency about its plans.

The pay-off, according to Flannery, will be job opportunities, better traffic flow, more green spaces, and a better connection to the natural environment. Quite a lot for just a name. Watch this space.

 

 

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