Speech by Councillor Seal Chong Wah, at BCC Chambers, on 6th August 2024. 

Through the chair, I rise to speak on one item, that is the rehabilitation of Mount Coot-tha Quarry and the Schrinner Council’s plan for its privatisation. 

I have already spoken in these chambers, during budget discussions, about the lack of council action and transparency on closing the Mt Coot-tha Quarry and today I have asked a question to the Lord Mayor. The Mount Coot-tha Reserve is arguably the most important natural area of Brisbane. This iconic sanctuary of Eucalypt forest, rainforest gullies, creek lines and Koalas should be given the highest level of protection by this council.

This Council administration, however, does not believe Mt Coot-tha deserves the highest protections. This is demonstrated by the fact that this Schrinner Council is still carving out a 26 hectare crater into Mt Coot-tha, with no end in sight. An open-pit Quarry less than 5 kilometres from the centre of Brisbane. This huge quarry is still blasting, spraying noise and dust onto households, and onto this iconic forest. 

The Lord Mayor, last June, announced a half-million dollar commitment to consult residents on the future of Mt Coot-tha and Pine Mountain quarries. So far all we’ve seen is a ‘have your say website’. We know that all of that $500,000 wasn’t spent on ONE webpage consultation. The local neighbourhood plan requires the quarry to be closed by 2025, but that is highly unlikely to happen when there is no budget and no timeline from council. 

In this council’s latest budget, even the very phrase ‘planning for quarry transition’ has disappeared. While this Council administration have said that they will close this huge block of inner-Brisbane land, like many other election promises, they won’t actually commit to a date or timeline.  

You would think that after 20 years of being in power, that this LNP administration would have learnt how to balance their budget, to be able to actually follow through on their election commitments. In October 2019, Michael Berkman, State MP for Maiwar hosted a ‘Future of Mt Coot-tha Quarry’ forum with the Mt Coot-tha Protection Alliance with more than 100 local residents attending. 

From this forum and subsequent feedback to elected representatives on the Westside, residents have told us very clearly, they want a rehabilitated quarry to be kept for public open-access space. Residents want this Brisbane asset to be kept as public greenspace that enhances the Mt Coot-tha natural landscape and compliments the Botanic Gardens.

Just last week, we are now seeing proposals promoting hotels and ziplines in a rehabilitated Quarry. A design by PRAX, a local Brisbane company, has already received heavy promotion in the news media. Placing a hotel in Mt Coot-tha completely ignores the overwhelming community desire for the quarry to be converted into public space, with no commercialisation.

The Lord’s Mayor’s response to this proposal for a Hotel and zipline in Mt Coot-tha was to clearly signal that a Schrinner Council wants to privatise and commercialise Mt Coot-tha to maximise tourism.  We heard the Lord Mayor in the chambers today that we need an income source. We need private investment. That means a new large area of Mt Cootha will become privatised.

I will say it again. It is vital that a revitalised quarry is kept as public space and it concerns me deeply that this Schrinner Council is showing support for a major privatisation and commercialisation of Mt Coot-tha, including hotels and ziplines. PRAX’s inclusion of a zipline also flies in the face of the community’s opposition to a Zipline.

In 2019, the Lord Mayor who had only held this position for four days, agreed with the residents of Brisbane that Mt Coot-tha was not the right place for a Zipline. I quote the Lord Mayor from an article with the ABC Radio Brisbane on the 11th April 2019. 

"The majority think Mt Coot-tha is not the right spot for it," the Lord Mayor went on to say,  "I believe the community believes, there are other locations where something like a zipline can occur. When we voted on this project in Council back in December 2017 there had been very little community feedback. You have to listen to people and then you have to make clear strong decisions and that's what we've done here."

Following on from all the extremely generous developer infrastructure discounts this Schrinner council are giving to their developer mates, this administration now see an opportunity to handover some highly sought after public land to private developers as well.

I will finish here, with a warning to this council, that commercialisation of a rehabilitated Quarry and Mt Cootha will be strongly resisted by the community, and this resistance will be actively supported by the growing number of elected Green representatives in West Brisbane.