After all of the natural disasters we have endured in central and northern Queensland this year, it’s time we really set in stone firmer plans for how to better prepare for the inevitable next round of challenging times.
There’s growing support for a transport hub in Emerald – it makes a lot of sense and many primary producers are advocating for it but negotiations seem to have come to a halt.
The issues that we have during the wet seasons are becoming more regular with flooding on the Bruce Highway and when its cut off by water we can’t get traffic up and down this crucial transport route.
The great thing about Emerald is that it’s got four way access to the east, west and north and south as well.
Emerald is perfectly placed to be a transport hub in times of crisis, and help the community get back on its feet quicker.
This plan also has the advantage of taking some of the traffic load off the already busy Bruce Highway.
There’s been a bit of a push on – and it’s happening slowly – to upgrade the inland freight route from basically north of Charters Towers right through to Mungindi on the NSW corner.
And that runs through Emerald. So this really is a great opportunity to build a freight hub there to capture all the produce and the goods from central Queensland, and create a distribution centre as well.
This is becoming more of a pressing issue to get this alternative ready – before disaster strikes.
There is a lot of transport running up and down this way here now, but they’re loading up north and just running all the way through and not picking up anything around here. Through any of CQ.
We need a coordinated hub. And it would work in really well with moves to establish a Meatworks in Emerald as well.
We’ve already got the Yamala cotton gin there and obviously a pretty big grain centre and saleyards and the trucking facilities are there, so there’s a lot happening already to make a project like this worthwhile.
Building a more coordinated freight hub and intermodal transport hub at Yamala just outside of town makes a lot of sense – it’s the perfect site for all that to happen.
It’s been talked about for two or three years, but we need more advocacy for it to become a reality.
It’s probably just starting to gain a bit more momentum now that AgForce has picked up the idea in the last few months that we’ve started talking about it.
But we just need to keep pushing.
Otherwise it’ll just fall over and die in the water.
We need to keep it front and centre in people’s minds putting plans in place before the next wet season.
It’s too late when the floods are happening.
We really need to be planning ahead now.
