Background to the issue

Beautiful Airlie Beach was the latest coastal town to join the nation-wide fight against government give-aways of public land for private development when Save Our Foreshore was founded in 2004.

The town is the heart of Whitsunday's tropical coast and its public foreshore land was being literally given away to development firm FKP to build a 4-storey, 125 room twin key hotel with alcohol gaming facilities adjacent to public parkland, for the budget hotel chain Outrigger.

FKP wouldn't have had to buy the land - the State government was giving it to them. Annual lease payments would have gone to the State for using the land but would have been made by subsequent owners by selling units at a price that included a land component. Additional annual monies paid to Whitsunday Shire Council were expected to be $500,000.

These lease payments and the fact that the land was worth between $10m and $14m were all irrelevant to locals who simply wanted to preserve the public foreshore land for public use. They had lobbied and worked for years to fund and build the foreshore lagoon, and felt they stood to lose that and the parkland along the foreshore whether through the Outrigger project or future deals cut by council once the precedent was set.

Originally, council decided to allow commercial development on this patch so they could fund the cost of running the lagoon - the only public swimming pool on the coast and islands.

However, the lagoon was already being funded from the rate base (council takes in many millions of dollars per annum in rates). The original reason no longer existed. The land should remain public.
In summary:
  1. FKP was to be given $10m block of foreshore land in the middle of Airlie Beach so that it could construct units which to sell at the going price.
  2. FKP wwould not be funding the (now unnecessary) maintenance costs of the Airlie Beach Lagoon, subsequent owners and gamblers would.

The tender process was complex and people were suspicious. But, the development did not comply with the Town Plan and therefore should have been rejected.

Councillors were told they would be responsible for one of two futures for Airlie Beach:

  1. Seaside slum like every other seaside slum, or
  2. Beautiful and unique destination to match our magnificent Whitsundays.
While the community has now managed to gain promises from the State and local governments that the land would not be used for private purposes, we must be ever vigilant. There are other threats looming already.

We are not alone as a community in fighting to retain an identity, while reasoned and sustainable development and growth occur.

Please contact us at saveourforeshore@whitsunday.net.au if you need any more information We want to stop the give away of Queensland coastal public land and the homogenization of our towns.

We still have not found out why everything in relation to this development was "commercial in confidence" and what there was to hide. Save Our Foreshore Inc is the community group formed by locals to stop this kind of development and to get to the bottom of what happens here so we can prevent the loss of other public lands in the Whitsundays.