Minister for Mines & Energy Disappoints Daintree Residents
The Northern Brown Bandicoot is a cheeky little critter that forages around the edge of rainforest dwellings, often intruding beyond the limits of residential sensibility
It has recently been revealed that Queensland’s Minister for Mines & Energy, the Hon. Geoff Wilson MP, had quietly slipped into the Daintree rainforest, without any public notification or liaison opportunity for local residents. As has been previously reported, the Queensland Government excised the Daintree Rainforest Community from the Electricity Supply Authority’s Distribution Area in May 2000.
At the time of the excision, there was a policy justification that such an unprecedented regulatory excision was necessary to minimalise the uptake of existing freehold rights to settlement. The fact that the Government, in cooperation with the now defunct Douglas Shire Council, was aggressively stripping development rights through Planning Scheme amendments whilst simultaneously acquiring freehold lands for the enrichment of the public estate, was obviously enlivened by the denial of mains quality electricity.
However, when conservation concerns were finally laid to rest, with the adoption of an award-winning planning scheme and the invocation of Iconic Places legislation, the local ratepayers association cordially invited the Minister for Mines and Energy to attend upon the disaffected community, that had for eight years suffered crippling economic and offensive environmental hardships through the excision-policy’s engine-generator-per-property-based alternative, so that the Minister could see for himself, the consequences of his government’s isolated policy.
It is very difficult for local landholders to understand why the Minister would have determined such an exclusionary visit. Had he restricited his liaison to any of his government’s departmental facilities staff, he could only be advised on a system that was installed and maintained by the State’s Electricity Supply Authority within the Excision Area at rates determined by statewide-equalized tariffs. This provision is entirely appropriate, but what is not, is the exclusion of all non-state government-owned properties and their residents who are required to pay in the order of twenty-times equalized tariffs per kilowatt hour.
In an absence of explanation, residents are left with little choice but to deduce that the Minister came to the Daintree as a tourist, but at who’s expense? After all, he is the Minister responsible for the excision of the only community in Queensland to have ever been forced into this discriminatory predicament and on his only visit ever; he obviously chose discretion as the better part of valour.