From the Mayor's Desk - 18 January 2022

From repairing and preparing for floods, to Omicron and open borders – a big year ahead in 2022 

It’s my pleasure to wish Goondiwindi Region residents a very happy New Year for 2022. There is much to look forward to in the year ahead, with many Council projects and Capital Works scheduled. There’ll also be an extraordinary amount of reconstruction works going on, as we look to recover and repair from significant and widespread flood damage at the end of 2021.

I’m pleased to say that we’ve had excellent support from both the state and federal governments for recovery works in our region. The Goondiwindi Region has been given special consideration in the form of exclusive funding, and we have received $1 million allocated towards Inglewood in particular, to improve future flood preparedness and the town’s evacuation response.

I encourage impacted residents and businesses to make the most of the assistance available and, where possible, reinvest this back into our local economy. For more information, visit: https://www.qrida.qld.gov.au/program/special-disaster-assistance-recovery-grants-central-southern-and-western-qld-producers

As we enter our third calendar year of the pandemic, I can at least finally say that common sense has prevailed and, as of last Saturday, the Queensland border is once again open for domestic travel. We now look forward to returning to our close-knit, cross-border way of life - without border restrictions.

Our border communities have borne the brunt of these restrictions since 2020 and, despite the challenges, we should be proud that our judiciousness successfully bought the rest of the state the time they needed to get vaccinated. The Goondiwindi Region consistently led Queensland in its vaccination roll-out: we held Delta at bay in 2021, and now in 2022 we are in a strong position to limit hospitalisations from Omicron. 

While our region is more than 95% fully-vaccinated now, I implore those final few residents to take the step to protect themselves. The statistics show that people who refuse to get jabbed are taking a huge risk: our Chief Health Officer John Gerrard said yesterday that if you are unvaccinated in Queensland you are 24 times more likely to end up in an intensive care unit than someone who has been triple vaccinated.

Our local medical centres and pharmacies have reported that they have delivered several thousand booster vaccines already, once again putting our region at the forefront. I applaud our community’s prompt uptake. A reminder that the booster is available by appointment in all three of our region’s medical centres; walk-ins are accepted in Goondiwindi pharmacies.

Two years in, I understand that we – all of us – are tired of this pandemic and its constant impacts, and we want to get back to life as ‘normal’. But we all knew the current outbreak was coming, so for the moment, we must continue to try and prevent a sharp peak in cases, as this will only further impact service availability (especially healthcare) and supplies.

One great example of community leadership in this regard was the announcement that the Festival of Hell (Hell of the West triathlon) has been postponed until April. The HOTW is a major tourism event for our region, and I applaud the committee for this difficult decision. I trust the event will be just as good - if not better - on the new date of 2-3 April.

In a similar vein, Council has had to make the decision to change the format of its Goondwindi Region Australia Day Awards ceremony this year: it will be held in advance on a smaller scale and then shared online on 26 January. Council must honour a responsibility to keep the community safe, but this does not take away from the extraordinary contributions that our citizens have made to our community. I urge all residents to join in the ceremony online on Australia Day, and let’s acknowledge and celebrate those citizens who do so much for our region.