Construction of Gardner Road - Priestdale Road to Underwood Road

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

Full Chambers Meeting -8th September 2026

I rise to speak on the E&C Committee report Clause A, regarding the proposed Contracting Plan to Construct Gardner Road.

This LNP administration wants to build a new 4 lane suburban road. This is a brand new road. A clean slate. A chance to build protected bikeways on a road that connects to a busway station. 

But this LNP administration is planning no protection for cyclists. Just a lick of paint. No wonder Brisbane’s car congestion is terrible: this is how this administration treats people who try to use any alternative. You don’t get a frequent bus. You don’t get wide and even footpaths. And you clearly don’t get safe protected bike lanes.

This kind of wide 4 lane road, and the sprawling suburban development of Rochedale acreages, are terrible for a city. Shops, chemists, and schools are just too far away for walking. Buses struggle for ridership, because people just aren’t close together. Residents get stuck driving everywhere, on increasingly congested roads.

But worst of all, it lets developers cut down forests, or clears old farmland that could have supported our wildlife through rewilding. In this very project, the LNP administration is planning to bulldoze koala habitat. The LNP are proposing to clear dozens of trees across over a hectare, in the local waterway corridor, Matter of State Environmental Significance, and High Ecological Significance overlays of our City Plan. This is right next to a development that this same LNP approved, which cleared roughly 4 hectares of koala habitat. Urbis, Bespoke Rochedale, and this LNP administration should be ashamed.

The LNP, and Lord Mayor Schrinner, through the chair, don’t care about bulldozing koala forest.

But the victims won’t just be koalas. This patch of forest covers the riparian zone of a feeder into Bulimba Creek. This is a delicate ecosystem, of insects and bird life, that’s a sanctuary within the suburb. And this administration will bulldoze the whole thing.

Between 2009 and 2019, Brisbane’s canopy already dropped from covering 35% to 32% of this city. That happens because of projects like this, and the development that the LNP approved next door.

We’re entering the most severe recorded El Nino weather pattern that this city has experienced. We’ve just had 34 degree weather, only 6 days into Spring. We’re living in an erratic and warming climate.

Now, of all times, is when we need to keep the trees we do have, and plant thousands more. Not bulldoze them for suburban roads. I guess this is what we would expect from a bunch of Climate deniers.

Trees cool our neighbourhoods. They shade our streets and homes. They disrupt the urban heat-island effect. This concrete and bitumen road will create urban heating, by absorbing heat during the day, and dispersing heat into the suburb at night.

We need to shift how we build this city. We need to look for opportunities for gentle density in established suburbs. We should be talking to our residents about more human-scaled LMR apartments around high streets and public transport. And we should be raising our deep planting requirements to 20%, so that more trees can cool our subtropical city.

Road projects like this have been unsustainable for decades. They continued this city’s sprawl, heated up our suburbs, and locked neighbourhoods into car-dependence.

We’re experiencing the results of this. We’re in for a devastating summer, and we’ll be extremely lucky to avoid devastating bushfires.

We can’t keep doing this. The bills are coming due.