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General News

23 October, 2024

EDITORIAL: Traeger's issues ignored during election campaign

There have been no major pledges for the electorate by any party.

By Matt Nicholls

There are no apparent grand plans for Traeger under the leadership of Labor’s Steven Miles or the LNP’s David Crisafulli.
There are no apparent grand plans for Traeger under the leadership of Labor’s Steven Miles or the LNP’s David Crisafulli.

Elections are meant to be about hope and the promise of a brighter future, however there has been very little to get excited about if you live in Traeger.

This is one of the biggest seats in Queensland, yet hardly a dollar has been pledged to improve our quality of life.

North West Weekly can’t recall any major announcements made by Labor, the LNP or the Katter’s Australian Party for our seat.

Which means that regardless of who wins government, we’ll be left with a crumbling Flinders Highway, a rail system that continues to stifle economic growth, out-of-date hospitals in Cloncurry and Charters Towers, a lack of dialysis in Normanton, no promise to fix the Gilbert River bridge and a host of cost-of-living issues.

Disappointingly, neither Steven Miles or David Crisafulli made the trip to the North West during the election campaign.

And while they were no doubt told by their “people” that Traeger is not a seat worth spending too much energy on, because it will almost certainly be won again by Robbie Katter, that’s not a strong sign of leadership by the two men hoping to lead a state that needs the royalties generated by our mineral-rich region.

In fact, since Glencore made the announcement about the closure of its underground copper operations – almost one year ago to the day – we haven’t seen the Premier or the Opposition Leader visit Mount Isa.

Fancy that?

A city faces 1200 job losses and yet neither Mr Miles or Mr Crisafulli thought it was pertinent to get on a plane to check up on us.

Instead, most of the fighting has been left to Mount Isa City Council, which has been trying to save and create new jobs.

By our calculations, the last visit to Mount Isa by Mr Crisafulli was about 18 months ago, when he labelled the city “an economic engine room for Queensland”.

Mr Miles hasn’t visited Mount Isa since taking on the top job, and we couldn’t find any record of him visiting in the last two years, although he did turn up in Traeger earlier this year for the sod turning of CopperString in Hughenden.

Mount Isa is hardly a remote location for a government official, either. When the taxpayer is paying for the flight, it’s actually very easy to get here, which makes the snub even more disappointing.

If you believe the polls, we’ll have a new government this time next week and that probably brings more questions than answers.

What will an LNP government look like under Mr Crisafulli?

While youth crime dominates the discussion in North Queensland, and perhaps rightly so, when we pound the pavements we hear from many who are struggling with the high cost of living.

To give the Miles government credit, it has at least pulled several levers to try and help household budgets, with generous electricity rebates, 50-cent fares for those lucky enough to have public transport options, and a handful of other measures, including cheaper car registration.

All of those are welcomed.

But what about for those living in the North West? What about those in Doomadgee or Mornington Island?

The freight subsidy has been a major flop, while the cost of buying a plane ticket out of Mount Isa or Cloncurry is still far too expensive for families.

Neither of the two major parties seem to show much interest in the issues facing people in the bush.

As for Robbie Katter, he’s been distracted talking about issues that had seemingly already been put to bed while he was in parliament.

With an outside chance that his party may hold the balance of power after Saturday night, the incumbent MP should have been pitching to the people of Traeger what his plan would be should KAP have a seat at the table in the next term.

His biggest win of late has been getting the major parties to talk about the future of underground copper operations at Mount Isa Mines, but whether that leads to any action remains to be seen.

Overall, it’s been a disappointing election campaign and we won’t hold our breath for better outcomes in Traeger.

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