THE two major parties do not consider the proposal of Charters Towers and Mount Isa in the same electorate to be a concern for parliamentary representation.
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Yet Townsville Enterprise’s chief executive Patricia O’Callaghan said it would affect economic growth in North Queensland.
“The two major urban centres of Mount Isa and Charters Towers are effectively on the opposite sides of the State and therefore face very different economic, social and political issues,” she said.
Labor’s state secretary Evan Moorhead does not mention the affected Dalrymple or Mount Isa electorates at all in his public objections to proposed changes of Qld’s electoral boundaries.
LNP’s state director Michael O’Dwyer acknowledged “considerable disquiet” with some of the Queensland Redistribution Commission’s (QRC) proposed changes.
Yet there was “no objection” to the Traeger electorate.
Mr O’Dwyer said four new electorates formed in the state’s south east ignored the decentralisation issue in Queensland.
“It is our considered view that one new district could have been and should have been located in regional Queensland, west of the Great Dividing Range,” he said.
“It is our assessment that the QRC did not take advantage of existing and proposed enrolments in regional Queensland to resolve considerable community dislocation, and to prevent the erosion of electors reasonable access to democratic representations.”
The LNP had only one recommendation to make among the four electorates that covered more than 100,000 square kilometres.
The proposal for Warrego should have better considered the east-west orientation of the transport route of the Warrego Highway.
But the LNP had no criticism for the proposals for Cook, Gregory, or Traeger.
Dalrymple’s MP Shane Knuth was against the disappearance of his electorate, which would break up into three others including Traeger.
The KAP member said it was not possible for the Traeger member to effectively represent an electorate twice the size of the United Kingdom.
“While the Electoral Commission of Queensland’s proposal factors in population growth, it completely overlooks geographical and logistical factors,” the State Member for Dalrymple said.
