KAP Leader and Member for Traeger Robbie Katter has welcomed another significant political influence to the KAP's long-running fight for a separate North Queensland state and hopes the growing supporter list will help cement the path to a referendum.
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Today, Townsville Mayor, the Labor party's Jenny Hill, publicly pledged her support for the plan, saying the North would never get its fair share up against the two South-East Queensland-centric major parties, as well as the state's bloated bureaucracy in Brisbane's George Street.
The unlikely support of Mayor Hill came just three months after Independent MP Jason Costigan backflipped on his previous rejection of a separate state when he was a member of the LNP, and became an ally of the proposal.
"Political leaders and northern communities are fed up to the back teeth with constantly missing out to the south-east and disillusioned with the Brisbane-based major parties who continue to bleed the regions dry," Mr Katter said.
"Many Brisbane policy-makers have never stepped foot in North Queensland and can't possibly understand what the region wants and needs in order to prosper."
The mounting support for a separate state followed the release of a lacklustre state budget, which Mr Katter said delivered some essential health services but was otherwise big on rhetoric and empty of long-lasting legacy benefits to deliver nation-building projects and recover Queensland's economy.
The KAP's previous attempts at requesting an independent investigation into a new NQ state and form a secession plan were met with flippant remarks from Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk that it would wreak havoc with the State of Origin, but Mr Katter said the latest developments would be hard for Labor to ignore.
"We look forward to seeing how the Palaszczuk Labor Government will try to attempt and laugh this one off," he said.
Before the October Queensland election, the KAP announced its priority to push for a referendum on a separate NQ state, and for various government departments to be relocated north.
More than half of the state's government jobs were based in the south-east and Mr Katter said the KAP's government de-centralisation scheme could deliver the north about 3,800 public service jobs and reclaim some control over the state's future.
He proposed that the Department of Environment and Science's 2,946 jobs relocate to Townsville, the Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnership's 293 jobs go to Cairns, and SunWater's 512 jobs shift to Mackay.
"We want to get back to the times when public servants actually lived in the communities directly affected by the decisions they made rather than hide out in ivory towers in Brisbane," Mr Katter said.
In October, the KAP addressed the media, calling to free the north, revealing that North Queensland would become a state in its own right if a referendum was held immediately, according to exclusive ReachTEL polling.
Fifty-seven per cent of Townsville residents agreed or strongly agreed with the push for North Queensland to secede from the state's south.
The KAP's advocacy for a separate state traced back several years, amplifying in 2016 when ABC's Lateline reported Mr Katter's dire warning that Australia would face a reckoning if its three-tiered system of government was not overhauled.
Two years later in 2018, Mr Katter invited MPs and mayors north of Rockhampton to sign a request to the Premier to fund an independent investigation into the creation of a new NQ state and formulate a secession plan, but both major parties ultimately rejected the move.
Mr Katter said the KAP planned to continue pursuing the referendum and government de-centralisation proposals in Parliament and welcomed any new supporters to the cause.
READ ALSO: Robbie Katter reflects on the past year.
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