Sporadic announcements and meetings over the future of the quarantine hub have failed to provide even a whiff of an outcome.
If you were to pull apart the political guff on any given Queensland issue and attempt to calculate a ratio of soundbite to action, you would struggle to find a bigger fizzer than the noble, if not impractical, notion of turning the Pinkenba quarantine hub into crisis accommodation.
Queensland’s Centre for National Resilience, as the federal-owned quarantine village was named, was abandoned in 2022 without housing a single international arrival because Australia reopened its borders.Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner believed he had the solution. Rather than let it devolve into white elephantdom, the 500-bed facility on public land could be used to tackle the “twin scourges of a housing crisis and domestic violence”.
But within weeks, the federal government softened its position, beginning with Treasurer and south-east Queensland MP Jim Chalmers, who told reporters: “When it comes to Pinkenba, we are always prepared to work with state and territory governments to find common ground and work together to achieve our objectives.”“As we have consistently said, we will consider any formal detailed proposal from the Queensland government for the future use of the Pinkenba centre,” she said in June.
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