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Deadline on houseboats By Margie Maccoll Noosa River houseboat residents fear lives will be lost by desperate owners contemplating taking their river boats across the treacherous bar in order to comply with new Maritime Safety Queensland (MSQ) rules. MSQ has told live aboard boat owners without a registered mooring from 1 January they will be allowed only a 28 day stay per financial year and have to move their boats out of the river. Liveaboard houseboat owner Sally Hayes, who is trying to find a path forward for herself and others facing eviction from the river, said with only days remaining to the deadline people were becoming desperate. “Two people have said to me I’m going to have to go out over the bar in a riverboat not designed to go to sea. The river mouth is so treacherous even a competent boat person is struggling to go over the bar and you’ve got women with no boating experience out on the ocean going to take a riverboat over the bar because they’re pushed against the wall, because they’ve had no options, no support at all,” she said. Another boat owner sold his $160,000 boat for $1 last Friday, Sally said. “That is his life savings gone.” CONTINUED PAGE 4
Claytons Towing remove a houseboat from Noosa River on Monday, bound for Noosa Tip. (Rob Maccoll)
TAFE building plan January
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nually, offering creative industry courses such as fashion, art, industrial design, architecture and interior design. NRA Collaborative also proposed to undertake further consultation with the support of a local steering committee on future initiatives, which may include a theatre, creative art space for the community, and a research facility to support the local koala population. But after recently completing a reassessment of the buildings they advised Noosa MP Sandy Bolton that the option to reinvigorate was no longer viable due to vandalism and deterioration,
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and their plans for a design school had to be replaced. Ms Bolton met Andrew St Baker from the NRA Collaborative onsite, who advised the alternate proposal arrived at was for independent seniors living, which was one of the few uses allowable under the sites zoning, which ensures no clearing or impact to the biodiversity overlays and koala habitat. Disappointing but not surprising was how Ms Bolton described the outcome. “This is a result and reminder of the impacts of poor government decisions, processes that
take far too long and unacceptable behaviour of those who over the past decade have vandalised the site,” Ms Bolton said. “Our community will never forget the day it closed, nor the frustrating journey to try to save it, and the millions of taxpayer dollars invested in developing the site in 2004. This, along with many other TAFE facilities that closed under similar circumstances, is the ultimate example of a broken system. Neither my anger nor my determination to see those systems fixed has abated.” CONTINUED PAGE 2
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Plans for Tewantin TAFE to be reinvigorated into a new Sunshine Coast School of Design have been scrapped due to vandalism and building deterioration and replaced with a proposal for the site to accommodate independent seniors living. Award winning architectural and design practice NRA (Noel Robinson Architects) Collaborative, the preferred proponents from an Expression of Interest (EOI) process in 2021 had plans to to re-use the buildings to develop a new Sunshine Coast School of Design. The school was to feature educational facilities to service between 500 to 800 students an-