LGAQ President Mayor Mark Jamieson, accompanied by representatives of Peak Services, Hastings Deering, Telstra, LGIA Super, yours truly and the LGAQ’s digital journalist Nathalie Cattaneo are just back from an epic three-day 3600 km trip that took in eight western councils: Blackall-Tambo, Barcaldine, Longreach, Winton, Boulia, Barcoo, Paroo and Bulloo. Cumulative flight time was 11 hours in a light aircraft, with a total of 22 take offs and landings.
For the best part we just listened to what mayors, councillors and CEOs had to say. And there was plenty to record and tuck away into our memory banks. We chewed the fat on the big issues facing remote Queensland and talked about the fast looming water and wastewater infrastructure cliff and how that problem might be solved.
We had the talks around the council table, in council team rooms and in 4WDs to boot as mayors drove us around their patch. In Winton and Windorah, we had the added benefit of staying the night and kicking around ideas and possibilities over dinner and breakfast. A nice touch was getting up before a very chilly but memorable sunrise in Windorah to see the lunar eclipse, almost 50 years to the day since man landed on the moon.
Mayor Mark opened up every conversation by saying the LGAQ treated no two councils the same, that each of our 77 members was equally important to us and that their councils and communities mattered. For me, 27 years into the job as your Association CEO the Outback still has a profound effect. It is a timeless extraordinary land. There are no words that adequately describe its hold on first nations people and the primary producers and towns folk of the remote inland, some 11,000 Queenslanders all up. It sure captures the heart.
Not only are rural and remote councils well represented around the LGAQ Policy Executive table by your district reps but also by the President himself who would have visited all those shires in three short years.
Nathalie our digital journalist is in the process of cutting a video tribute to the land, councils and people of Outback. Keep an eye out for it on our social media channels.
Finally this week the LGAQ Sherlock team launched the Fuel Detective, just weeks after unveiling the Energy Detective. The Sherlock Big Data and Data Analytics team are firing on all cylinders with more Detectives on the way. I personally cannot wait to see the Pest and Weed App - Incognito Mosquito - the Insective Detective.