E&C Committee Clause C&D - Audit of Council

Speech to Council Chambers - Councillor Seal Chong Wah – Paddington Ward

Full Chambers Meeting -15th September 2026

I rise to speak on the E&C Committee report Clause C and D, regarding the auditor-general’s audit reports, and the audited consolidated financial statements.

I’ll start by giving credit where it’s due. It’s great to see this detailed audit reporting. Thank you to the Auditor-General for your thorough review of the consolidated annual report. This is one of the few transparency processes that this Council hasn’t managed to remove.

But what do these reports show?

It shows this LNP Council’s cuts.

Let’s take one figure: ‘asset sustainability ratio’. Every year a Council’s assets degrade by some amount. This asset sustainability ratio tells you how much the Council is investing in renewing their assets, compared to that degradation. You’d hope that this hovers around 100%, so that footpaths, roads, parks and libraries are all maintained or replaced when they need to be.

This LNP administration achieved 62%.

This LNP Council isn’t properly funding maintenance. 

That means, each year, more than a third of that degradation isn’t being fixed. This means that footpaths are layered in bitumen patch jobs. This means that roads are a hodgepodge of pothole fills. This means that the Story Bridge gets spot repairs instead of proper renewals. The LNP are also slow-walking, if not reversing, any drops in greenhouse emissions. These papers show that this Council has dropped emissions by 8 percent since 2016-17. That’s better than last year. But it’s a long way from this Council’s target of 30% by 2031. And it’s miles from the emissions cuts we need to limit global warming.

But this is just as this Council starts running electric Metro’s, the State LNP have announced that they’ll only buy diesel buses. It doesn’t matter if electric buses are cheaper. It doesn’t matter if they don’t emit greenhouse gases that speed up global warming and erratic weather. And this LNP Council administration has taken this lying down, instead of spruiking the electric buses that they’ve been so proud of recently. The 8 percent drop in emissions won’t drop much further.

The LNP also decided not to report the average household emissions this year. It probably wouldn’t look good given this LNP Council blocked several local community batteries. As always, this administration could be investing more in solar systems and electrifying the Council’s vehicle fleet. But these are problems of the LNP’s own making.

Since the Newman years, this Council has committed Brisbane to a car-only transport system. They did this with privatised projects like the Legacy Way, the Clem7, or by widening Kingsford Smith Drive and Lytton Road, and so on, instead of investing in buses and bikeways. 

Roads and cars are the most expensive, highest emissions, and least efficient way to move thousands of people in a city. So by building and widening motorways and main roads, the LNP locked this city into congestion, petrol fumes and huge maintenance costs. That’s what sits behind these low ‘asset sustainability ratios’.

And through climate denial, this LNP administration has failed to prepare this city for the impacts of global warming. The LNP have continued to let developers build homes in serious flood zones throughout this city. This report tried to spruik the state-funded flood buyback program, but this administration has approved thousands of apartments in flood zones. This LNP administration is letting developers profit, and then using public money to clean up the damage.

And this damage is going to become more, and more common.

We need to turn this ship around. We need to make developers pay their fair share, so that we can build a city that isn’t car-dependent. That isn’t high-emissions. That isn’t unprepared for our new climate.