BETTER TO BE STEP AHEAD

COOMERA MP Michael Crandon’s call for a public hospital in the Gold Coast’s rapidly developing northern suburbs reflects two important realities.

The first is that suburbs like Coomera are absorbing much of Queensland’s population and growth explosion, with numbers increasing not just through births and international migration but also through interstate migration and from a drift to the Gold Coast from other parts of Queensland.

The northern suburbs have become a city in their own right. This isn’t a matter of duplicating services that are not needed. With the linear layout of the Gold Coast, and with transport issues, health facilities have to be provided where the people are.

The other reality is a looming state election. People can by cynical and might dismiss the MP’s campaign as a poll stunt.

But despite the existence of the relatively new billion-dollar Gold Coast University Hospital at Parkwood, there is already a real need for proper health facilities at Coomera, given the rocketing population and massive growth in that corridor.

Indeed, infrastructure should be a key issue across the entire Gold Coast.

Australian governments have rarely been a step ahead with infrastructure, but Coomera is a prime example of the need to break that sorry mould. The Gold Coast Medical Association and paramedics support the push for a Coomera hospital. It would be a brave politician who tried to argue otherwise.