While Victoria Park/Barrambin is under threat by budget cuts and a stadium, there’s another huge area of land that is lacking transparency over its future. The Mt Coot-Tha quarry.
The Council administration has been cagey about the plans for this quarry. They said that they’ve committed to closing and rehabilitating this huge area of inner-Brisbane land, but they’ve never put forward a date for that to happen. As it stands, this huge quarry is still blasting, spraying noise and dust onto households, and onto some of the most important forests in this city.
Forests like Mt Cootha are a huge part of what makes this city special. Mt Coot-tha forest is a vital asset to the residents of my Ward who frequent it and to all of Brisbane. But right now, this Council is leaving a 26 hectare crater in the middle of it.
The Lord Mayor, last June (2023), announced a half-million dollar commitment to consult about the future of Mt Coot-tha and Pine Mountain quarries, and so far we’ve only seen a ‘have your say’ website. $380,000 of that was spent last year, and the rest was meant to be spent this year, for the Council to create a ‘draft vision’ for the project, but this year’s money is nowhere to be found. To make matters worse, the very phrase ‘planning for quarry transition’ that appeared in last year’s budget (2022/23), has now disappeared from this one (2024/25).