Coaster plot a dry argument
JUST like that, plans for a fearless, year-long campaign to secure Cairns drinkers’ right to dryness scuttled at the stroke of a cartographer’s pen.
The premature leak of Queensland’s new draft electoral boundaries elicited nary a raised eyebrow among the bulk of voters on Thursday night.
Why would they? Just squiggles on a map. Does it really matter a damn if you cast your ballot in Hinchinbrook or Hill? Well, it does to me. As a Woree resident, albeit not updated on the electoral roll, my vote has been wrested from Rob Pyne’s electorate of Cairns and gifted to Mulgrave, where Treasurer Curtis Pitt has a firm squeeze on the steering wheel.
Pitt will be chortling all the way to the polling booths, with the more conservative southern cane farming end of his seat, now falling under a brand spanking new electorate, Hill.
He is losing Yarrabah, where he won 94.44 per cent of the vote at the 2015 election, but he will see this redraw as a major win.
The right-leaning Innisfail element is no longer his concern, election-wise. He still received a 59.31 per cent majority at the Innisfail polling booth last election — but let’s not for- get this was coming off a massive protest vote against the then-LNP government and, more precisely, former premier Campbell Newman.
LNP candidate for Mulgrave Robyn Quick faces a tough fight for a seat about half the size, and decidedly more urban, than it was in 2015.
A big question mark hovers over Hill, named after Dorothy Hill, a Brisbane-born geologist and palaeontologist who died at age 90 in 1997, and served as secretary to the Great Barrier Reef Committee for nine years.
Dalrymple MP Shane Knuth is likely to stand either there or in the new McMaster seat after his electorate was stricken from the map.
These are early days indeed and all parties are scrambling to work out exactly what the new boundaries will mean for them.
In Brisbane, Labor Environment Minister Steven Miles and the LNP’s Scott Emerson have had their seats of Mt Coot-tha and Indooroopilly dissolved and assimilated into the new electorate of Maiwar.
That is going to be a massive political brawl once the election has been called.
Let’s get serious here. For most of us this whole episode is a bunch of intangible conjecture that so far means very little.
Even the major parties are yet to work out what it means for their jobs.
But, in very material terms, this boundary realignment has destroyed my plot to get Cairns pubs to listen to the average punter and rage is seething inside me with the heat of a thousands suns.
I live at Woree. My vote would have gone to the electorate of Cairns. Now it goes to Mulgrave.
What I wanted was to organise a fierce, ground-level movement, not yet approved with my editors, to get beer coasters compulsorily placed on every outdoor table in every pub of Cairns.
Whichever candidate could best ensure a minimum mandatory number of coasters on every table would have my vote and the votes of the movement’s no doubt enormous membership.
The current coaster situation in several unnamed pubs, invariably the fancier types within the city-centre, is a disgrace.
Great puddles of tropical condensation pool on every beer garden surface, creating a repulsively slick environment for leaning, and for lodging a wallet.
The region’s climatic conditions are no secret. Beers sweat prodigiously up here.
Physically walking up to request a small piece of cardboard from behind the bar on every visit is an unnecessary and difficult step when one’s boot is already wobbly. Possibly even dangerous. I rarely hit the sauce in pubs at Gordonvale or its surrounds, which remain under the Mulgrave umbrella, but when I do their coaster-to-cup ratio is almost always bang-on. Cairns is the problem. But now, as a nonresident of that electorate, to run the campaign just seems disingenuous.
This city needs someone to pick up the mantle and fight for our inalienable right to bend our elbows without becoming drenched in a tabletop full of condensation.
THE CURRENT COASTER SITUATION IN SEVERAL UNNAMED PUBS, INVARIABLY THE FANCIER TYPES WITHIN THE CITY-CENTRE, IS A DISGRACE