Speech by Councillor Seal Chong Wah, to full Brisbane City Council Council Meeting, Thurs 26th Jun 2025

Pay more, get less. That’s the defining story of this year’s Brisbane City Council budget.

Under Program 3: Sustainable Cities, this budget should be about protecting what makes Brisbane liveable — our parks, our trees, our waterways, and our climate resilience. But instead of investing in the green lungs of our city, the LNP is cutting back. Cutting greenspace. Cutting tree cover. Cutting investment in the natural assets that keep our city cool, beautiful, and liveable.

This is not just neglect — it’s a deliberate choice. A budget is more than numbers on a page; it reflects what a Council values. And this budget shows, loud and clear, that the LNP prioritises PR spin over public good, secrecy over scrutiny, and short-term savings over long-term sustainability.

Let’s call Program 3 what it really is: the Unsustainable City.

While residents are paying more through rising rates and fees, they are getting less of what truly matters. Less shade. Less green. Less access to public space. This budget accelerates Brisbane’s decline into a hotter, harsher, and less liveable city.

Under Strategy 3.3.3: Grow, Improve and Maintain Brisbane’s Network of Urban Parks, you would expect to see serious investment in the spaces that keep our city green, cool, and livable, as the climate crisis intensifies. Instead, this budget delivers the opposite. This year, the LNP has cut $36 million from the combined capital and expenses budget for new parks, park upgrades, and maintenance. 

For capital expenses alone there is 44% cut to capital works compared to last year. But these massive unprecedented cuts to our greenspaces don’t stop there - the forward estimates reveal more than 50% cuts in every future year compared to previous forward estimates. This is not a one-off dip. It’s a collapse in investment in the very places that make our suburbs liveable, that makes our city livable.

This is not just about aesthetics. It means fewer shaded areas for families. Less habitat for native wildlife. More heat, more glare, more concrete. As our summers grow more dangerous, Brisbane’s urban heat island effect is intensifying — and the LNP’s response is to rip money out of the parks and trees that help protect us.

Under Strategy 3.3.3, this Council claims to “grow and improve” our park network - but how can that be taken seriously when the funding has been gutted? These enormous cuts to our investment and maintenance of our greenspaces, come directly on the back of the LNP changing our city plan to allow for a reduction of 290 hectares of greenspace over the next 11 years, based on population ratios. 

This is no accident. It’s the LNP’s blueprint: clear the trees, carve up the land, build more highrises, more roads, and more Olympic tourist venues. This is a vain council and Lord Mayor who only care about maximising growth, developers, Olympic prestige and their donors. Staying with Strategy 3.3.3, Grow, Improve and Maintain Brisbane’s Network of Urban Parks the LNP is eyeing off our largest remaining green spaces - Victoria Park / Barrambin and Mt Coot-tha forest reserve - not to preserve or celebrate their uniqueness, but to commercialise, develop and monetise them.

The Council is now colluding with the State Government to break key promises made in the Olympic Host City contract not to build Olympic Stadiums in our cultural heritage parks. At the same time the State Government, Department of Environment has recommended that virtually all of Victoria Park/Barrambin be given full heritage status. This further highlights how this LNP administration cares nothing about our city's unique Heritage parks and legal contracts with the International Olympic Committee. The cuts in Strategy 3.3.3 reveal a council who treats its commitments with contempt and treats residents as obstacles, not stakeholders. Parks like Barrambin, once lost - are lost forever.

Looking at our budget under Strategy 3.3.2 Growing Our Urban Forest.

We see a city that is going backwards on tree shade canopy. The most recent secret internal council review, leaked to the media, showed a decline from 35% to 32% over ten years. That’s not a trend. That’s an emergency. And it’s no surprise why. This Council is allowing thousands of mature trees to be removed across the city, while replacement saplings - often just tube stock - will take decades to form a meaningful canopy.

Council’s “Olympic Corridors tree planting program” is more about optics timed for Olympic headlines, not about restoring lost canopy or responding to community need. This budget also delivers deep and dangerous cuts to stormwater resilience and drainage - at a time when Brisbane can least afford it.

Under Strategy 3.5.1: Delivering Drainage Networks, there’s a $19.5 million cut to the capital budget for new drainage infrastructure, compared to last year. Under Strategy 3.5.2: Stormwater Management Maintenance and Rehabilitation, a further $14.4 million has been slashed from ongoing maintenance, compared to last year.

And under Strategy 3.6.2: Stormwater Treatment and Waterway Access Infrastructure, there’s a $3.4 million cut from the very systems that filter runoff and protect our waterways, comparing the combined expenses and capital to last year.

That’s $37.4 million stripped from flood resilience in a city where so-called “1-in-100-year” floods are hitting every few years. These aren’t abstract numbers — they’re decisions that will leave neighbourhoods more vulnerable, homes damaged, roads washed out, parklands eroded, and residents devastated.

Brisbane residents don’t want apologies after disaster strikes. They want investment in prevention. Cutting investment in stormwater infrastructure is fiscally irresponsible and socially uncaring. We’re not just paying for this with higher rates. We’re paying with our homes, our insurance premiums, and our children’s futures. 

Across so many Strategies in this Sustainable City program - 3.3.3, 3.5.1, 3.5.2, and 3.6.2 -, the picture is undeniable: this is not a budget for the future — it’s a budget for appearances. This LNP administration’s real priorities are clear — developer mates, prestige infrastructure, and political image - their priorities are not to create a sustainable liveable city for the people or who call this city home.

We see a different future.

We see Barrambin / Victoria Park restored to wild beauty, not paved for profit. We see the quarry at Mt Coot-tha closed and healed, not mined for another decade or more. We see a city that preserves its heritage tree canopy, cooled by this beautiful tree canopy and clean waterways.

A city protected from floods, by smart investment in stormwater and resilience. Because Brisbane is not a brand. It’s a living place that deserves to be governed as a truly sustainable city.