Hanging on to paradise

On a fine day from the observation tower of Q1, Surfers Paradise, still the world's tallest residential building, you can see from southern Brisbane to Byron Bay.

What a landscape. To the south, the high rises of Coolangatta and then Mt Warning, in all its world heritage glory. To the west, massive road systems cut through the landscape, linking acreage dwellers and canal home owners to the beach.

On the northern strip, high rises again, in greater concentration than anywhere else in Australia.

In the distance Moreton Bay offers a glimpse of green, though the scar of sand mining on Stradbroke is a reminder that in this state mining always comes first.

Welcome to South-east Queensland, where the coastal landscape has been more aggressively developed and less green space has been retained than anywhere else in coastal Australia. Soon the $600 million Tugun bypass will whisk Brisbanites into the arms of another state.

And when more and more people realise that 90 per cent of the green space they see to the south of Q1 is in New South Wales, who can blame the escapees? Until the 1980s Byron Bay was a small coastal town based on dairying and a meatworks.

A cyclone in 1954 wiped out its jetty and its industries succumbed to more efficient operators elsewhere.

In a remarkable transformation, it now gets almost two million visitors a year, more than half from Queensland.

Why fight the traffic on the so-called Gold Coast highway when you can escape just as quickly to a neighbouring state which has taken coastal conservation and green space provision seriously?

Why travel to the Sunshine Coast when you will be able to get to the Tweed Valley in the same time?

Brisbane, with its Gold and Sunshine coasts, is now set to colonise a third coastline.

And until they were sacked, the developer-dominated Tweed River Council was there to lend a hand to any developer who wanted to re-instate a sand dune, including dunes that were never there in the first place.

We await with great interest to see whether the NSW Government-appointed commissioners, including Lucy Turnbull, can turn the tide in the Tweed. But at least the Carr Government intervened to prevent the worst excesses of massive coastal redevelopment.

The much relied on South East Queensland Regional Plan is supposed to save us from haphazard development, but despite its protestations of being green, hardly a dollar is being spent by the state government on new green space acquisition. It is hoping, magically, that farmers somehow will hold on and respect the urban footprint.

The view from Ql makes it plain how pathetically tiny the Greenmount and Burleigh Heads reserves are, and how much of the Spit and the Broadwater are built out. With Caloundra and Point Cartwright long overbuilt, and views of the mountains from Mooloolaba now replaced with the latest batch of high rises at Maroochydore and Cotton Tree, it is hard not to weep. Thank goodness for the Noosa National Park.

But if the canelands succumb to development, the Glass House Mountains, already the subject of subdivision applications, will be a backdrop to a new sea of coastal suburbia.

Environmentalists are always accused of being one-eyed, and of not understanding the joys of motoring through the built landscape.

With a maternal grandfather who was a motor dealer and a successful property developer from Maleny to Buderim and the coast, I have some appreciation of the development ethos. But when such development cuts across views of a grand hinterland already carved up, one longs for the coastal park from Brunswick Heads to Byron Bay.

What should the state government and the councils of south-east Queensland do? They should immediately conduct an audit of green space that can be retained, either through purchase or other measures available to them, from lower rates and land taxes to encouraging new forms of agriculture.

The Office of Urban Management's "urban footprint" is directing new urban development, but has no budget for active green space acquisition. Now that it is located in the Office of the Premier there is some hope that this lack of funding will be addressed.

The recent cyclone and the fact we are fast running out of water has made us all aware of how fragile our coastal settlements are.

But covering them in roads and buildings, to satisfy not just the demand for holiday accommodation, but investor demand for new property and developer demand for new profits, seems a short-sighted approach to the long-term future of Queensland.