Speech to Chambers

Delivered by Councillor Seal Chong Wah, to the Debate on Proposed Extensions to the Queen Street Mall, 25th November 2025.

I rise to speak on clause A, a proposed extension to the Queen Street Mall. While I support the idea of a mall, this is an opportunity to be more sustainable and resilient for our city and community.

I refer to our King George Square which is hot and grey. This LNP Council is quick to pave over our city! They demonstrate it daily with their refusal to incorporate genuine sustainability and resiliency measures to mitigate against the urban heat island effect and climate change.

This mall extension is a great chance to use this area to create a park with accessible pathways and plant more trees to enhance tree canopy. I have reviewed the ‘Albert Street Vision, creating the ‘green spine’’.

It looks like a nice glossy brochure but we know the LNP are great at greenwashing. This doesn’t mean it’s going to be a genuine green space with large tree canopy and some greenspace. In fact, many of the green blobs, in the concept plans, look like they may beare shade sails and not nothing to do with a ‘Green Spine’.

We need to expand our greenspace at every opportunity and our inner-city is going to feel the increased heatwaves of climate change

I refer to a 2019 peer-reviewed study, in the International Journal of Climatology, that investigated the impact of urban growth and climate change on heat stress during summer in Brisbane, from the 2019 to 2050. They focused on the urban heat island effect, where heat from direct sunlight is absorbed by concrete, pavers, and other high-heat-absorption materials, raising local temperatures.

It found temperature increases from climate change and urban growth will see Brisbane experience 48 dangerously hot nights, and 1 or 2 days at 40 degrees celsius per summer in 16 years. Thousands of Brisbane residents will be at risk of dying from extreme heat every summer.

To quote Dr Sarah Chapman, one of the researchers: "When we included urban growth, the number of hot nights increased even further," 

"With a doubling of hot nights, more people will be at risk of illness and death”.

Extreme heat is one of the most direct results of climate pollution. It is also one of the most harmful, with more Australians dying as a result of heatwaves since 1890 than from floods, bushfires and all other climate-fuelled disasters combined. Extreme heat harms our health, our livelihoods and our economy.

We’ve known about the urban heat island effect for years, and we know how to protect against it.

Planting more trees, expanding our greenspace, finding opportunities to create more green space and creating biodiversity corridors across our city should be part of our urban planning design.

We are not seeing any of these opportunities being taken up by this LNP council! Far from it! LNP are turning our city concrete grey. To an unsustainable city! It’s to be expected from a bunch of climate deniers that don’t accept the science! A party that doesn't ACT on climate science!

We are building an unliveable city for our children!

According to the Climate Council, Australia’s mortality data indicates that over the past four decades there has been a steady increase in the number of deaths in summer compared to those in winter, suggesting that climate change induced heat may already be affecting mortality rates.

We must take urgent steps to improve the preparedness for long-term resilience for our communities to minimise the impacts of worsening extreme heat.

Creating a park in Albert Street would mitigate against the urban heat island effect by replacing heat-absorbing surfaces with vegetation that provides shade and cooling through evapotranspiration.

This vision replaces pavement and concrete with plants, which cool the local environment through shade and moisture release, helping to lower both surface and ambient temperatures.

This would be moving towards creating a sustainable and resilient city for our community!

Let’s listen to climate scientists like Dr Sarah Chapman, who say, and I quote, "Getting rid of green space means increasing the temperatures not just in the city but surrounding areas, so the amount of green space in the city is a very important factor in urban temperatures."

Let’s make this mall into a thriving vibrant greenspace to help cool our city down and protect our community.