Cairns needs confidence now
THANK God for Ghassan Aboud.
Crystalbrook Collection’s billionaire owner is in town with family and friends to soak up the sights, sounds and flavours of the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair.
We need to give them an absolutely stonking welcome.
Investment begets investment, and it does not bear considering where we would be right now without Mr Aboud’s $370 million development portfolio in Cairns.
The dollars and optimism he injected into the Cairns economy came like a bolt from the blue, down to dumb luck on our part as much as anything else.
We were just fortunate he turned up with a dream to develop hotels and fell in love with the place.
Now it all comes down to capitalising on opportunity — and things are not looking too bad.
Cairns Regional Council Mayor Bob Manning was probably feeling as downtrodden as the rest of us at the start of the year, when everybody was running for the backyard bunker to escape the impending dung storm and angry loan sharks. It was a shocker. We had terrible weather, sure, but there was a vastly overstated perception down south that we were all drowning under 40-odd-foot of water just because Townsville copped some flooding. See you later tourism. Cathay Pacific evaporating into thin air hit us right in the goolies and more recently Freeport Indonesia’s cut to shipping ties with Cairns further aggravated our tender loins.
But just have a look at all that development happening on Abbott St (see pages 4-5 for the exhaustive and exhausting list).
This surge in developer confidence is exactly what our city needs right now and is a sign we are approaching a corner.
Things are going to change for the better over the next two years as long as we are not too slack or slow to embrace it.
It is not just development driving the city forward.
“The city is pumping,” a relieved Cr Manning said yesterday.
“When we made the announcement about weekend parking fees, we said timing was everything.
“We knew were going into the start of the tourist season with some big events like the Masters Games, then Ironman, and now the most successful CIAF we’ve ever had. “It has gone up a couple of notches. “We’re now starting to reap the rewards of what CIAF promised seven, eight and nine years ago.”
Getting rid of weekend parking fees is hardly the chief contributor to our current rise in fortune, but it is part of the mix.
Some of it comes down to meteorology.
“We had a slow start leading into the holidays but then it started to get very cold, wet and windy down south,” Cr Manning said.
“Now we’re seeing the benefits of that influx of visitors.”
Whatever the case, occupancy rates in Cairns hotels have shot right up to where proprietors wished they were earlier in the year.
Give them another month of this steady trade and profits should climb back up the Y-axis to what could be considered a strong tourist season, despite the shaky start. Not everything is hunky-dory. We need serious thought about how we market Cairns and Far North Queensland, clever thinking to capitalise on a potential shipping boom in the Pacific, and a concrete plan to overfill the gap left by Cathay Pacific’s misguided retreat.
But there is good reason to be positive and — not to be too much of a bootlicker — a lot of that can be traced back to our Syrian friend.
Cheers Gus!