Newsroom

February 2, 2022

KENNEDY MP, Bob Katter, has warned the State Government to back a second highway to Mareeba and free the tens of thousands of people stranded in the greater Atherton Tablelands after yet another truck rollover on the Kuranda Range Road today caused another extended road closure.

Mr Katter said that figures supplied to his office revealed the Kuranda road closes on average 44 times a year for an average of seven hours for each closure.

“This is arguably the only decent highway connecting the greater Mareeba-Atherton area of 50,000 plus people, to the rest of Australia,” Mr Katter said.

“Here it is again, another rollover on the Kuranda Range. The road is not made for trucks. It is a beautiful tourist road, slow and winding, through a beautiful jungle.

“It is a road that has very poor visibility, you have landslides, very dangerous slippery mud across the highway, precipitous slopes that are 400-500 ft deep and a bridge that we don’t know one week to the next if it is safe to use or not.”

“At this tragic time our thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends of those affected. How much more do we have to take until real action on an alternate route is taken?”

Mr Katter slammed the plan to rebuild the Barron River Bridge that has been the subject of investigation into its viability and safety for the better part of two years.

“Well (a), they aren’t rebuilding it, (b), they have absolutely no intention of building it and (c), it still leaves us using a beautiful tourist road as a major truck highway for heavy freight.

“The people of Cairns and the Cairns Hinterland will never be able to grow if they continue to use this road and the Government fails to build a highspeed highway.

“Without the Bridle Track Tunnel, the greater Tablelands will never be able to grow unless we punch that hole through the range. It’s good enough for Sydney; for Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth, and its good enough for Brisbane with Cunningham’s Gap, but it is not good enough for Far North Queensland.

“Well we will see about that. We will capture a commanding power and we will see about getting it done then and we will grow to be bigger than Brisbane.

“For some time I have joined the chorus of locals pushing for a second highway and we will fight like tigers to get our local road engineers working on the best option.

“We want a second path from Mareeba to the southern outskirts to Cairns and we want work to start on that now. Stop lying to us and doing nothing. Get it done.”