Robbie Katter has flagged the need for a rural residential development in Mount Isa to meet a growing lifestyle demand.
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The member for Traeger said his office had launched a survey to gauge community interest in developing rural residential blocks on the edge of the city.
"My background is 15 years of property valuations, eight of those were here in Mount Isa, and what I found during that period was that there is a severe shortage of rural residential sites," Mr Katter said.
"I remember discussing this with Mike Lodewyk the surveyor in town who pointed out to me that Mount Isa was an anomaly for a rural town, most were created when you had a more agricultural-type economy so you had market gardens, dairy farms and smaller sizes that were still viable a 100 years ago."
Mr Katter said in Mount Isa they dropped an urban footprint in the middle of nowhere.
"It wasn't organically grown as a town so it lacked those small to medium parcels around the periphery," he said.
"It's pretty easy to demonstrate by the population if you move outside the city the population is very small, with massive large pastoral leases."
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Mr Katter said there was a great opportunity for Mount Isa to use lower value less productive rural land for property development.
"There's a lot of people that come here and have that desire for rural lifestyle that is unsatisfied and that was highly evident with Breakaway estate which, as a valuer, defied logic because there were such high prices paid for land at the time.'
Mr Katter admitted it would costly and difficult for local authorities to deliver more land for rural residential but it needed to be done to stop families from moving to places like Mareeba and Charters Towers where such land was available.
"Even if I'm successful in this endeavour I don't think you're going to be able to deliver more than 20-50 blocks in the short term," he said.
Mr Katter said the state and local government needed to be part of the solution to deliver the right kind of land.
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Derek Barry
Editor of the North West Star Mount Isa since January 2016. Prior to that, an editor at several regional southern Queensland newspapers. Passionate about telling local stories. Comes with a strange accent to due an Irish accident of birth.
Editor of the North West Star Mount Isa since January 2016. Prior to that, an editor at several regional southern Queensland newspapers. Passionate about telling local stories. Comes with a strange accent to due an Irish accident of birth.
