Flight dreams must take off

BUILDERS have been told to sharpen their tools as construction of Aspial’s $550 million Nova City development edges ever closer to kicking off.

Cairns is just starting to ride high on a sorely-missed wave of investment and we need to make the most of it while the momentum exists.

Cairns Regional Council and Advance Cairns should be congratulated for organising a trade mission to Singapore to consolidate existing business partnerships and actively seek out new ones.

Trips like this can easily fall into the trap of becoming little more than junkets, with zilch achieved except a few nice tourist-trap photos uploaded to Facebook.

By all accounts, that was far from the case this time around.

The delegation included former JCU Professor Paul Gadek, who now works for Advance Cairns’s AgTNQ initiative aimed at finding new money-making opportunities for the region’s agricultural sector.

He pointed out that Cairns was the northern gateway to Asia and perfectly positioned to ”work closely with the Singaporean business community for our mutual benefit”.

This is why regular direct international flights are so important for the Far North — not just because of the tourists they bring, but also because of the amount of cargo that can be stowed in the plane’s belly when those visitors return home.

The more wide-body aircraft we can get in and out of our airport, the more Far North-grown produce we can sell overseas.

At the moment, the vast majority must still be transported to Brisbane before it leaves our borders.

Let’s change that. Chris Calcino chris.calcino@news.com.au