North wants a fair share

IF we have time to deface and pull statues down then we can take time to debate a real issue such as “A Separate State for North Queensland”.

North Queensland is and has suffered by bad city centric policies, such as shutting down the two environmentally green hydro electricity generation power stations in favour of a new coal- fired power station.

Separate State for North Queensland will never happen while we allow the erosion of our representation Queensland.

We have just seen the Electoral Redistribution Commission abolish the seat of Dalrymple and create four new seats in the southeast corner.

In reviewing the Queensland Gazette Thuringowa had 34,696 electors which they quoted as 0.11 per cent above quota. What happened to upper tolerance?

They transferred residential suburbs of Jensen, Deeragun, in North Shaw, Alice River, Rangewood and the Bohle Plains into Hinchinbrook because they are rural areas of Thuringowa.

Desktop analysis would have shown that these suburbs Bohle Plains, Deeragun, Mt Low, Bushland Beach, Burdell, Shaw, Jensen and North Shore are residential areas and do not have the same community of interest as rural Hinchinbrook.

When 93 of the seats in State Parliament are controlled by the one concen- tration of population and only 17 seats north of Rockhampton the outcome is devastating for North Queensland.

If $ 4 billion in royalties are from resource extraction how much was generated by the southeast corner? How much of the wealth of Queensland is generated within the southeast corner?

I asked the question in the Paul Murray Live show in Townsville and Senator Ian Macdonald gave the usual an- swer that we do not want more politicians, a statement debunked by your reporter’s article ( TB 30/ 8). This is not an argument as we are already supporting 93 of whom only 17 are above Rockhampton.

We pay more for insurance, council rates, electricity, fuel, food prices ( freight) and we want a fair share.

We now rely on the south for electricity and most of the food grown in the North is transferred south and then shipped back to us. But we choose to live here.

North Queensland is sick of being controlled by southern politics.

S. 7 paragraph of the constitution “… the Parliament of the State of Queensland ... may make laws dividing the State into divisions and determining the numbers of senators to be chosen for each division”. Never done. SANDRA CHESNEY,

Jensen.