We’ve had a lot of concerns about Wangetti Trail, the environmental impacts of it for example and the fact that it’s going through the Wet Tropics World Heritage area which is unique.

The biodiversity makes this a very special place and that’s why the Wet Tropics were listed. It goes through three National Parks as well. So the idea of this going through the middle of a national park and possible private ownership of campsites in the national park is an issue for us.

We’re very worried about maintenance. We’ve had a lot of discussions with government people. We’ve written submissions for the EPBC. We’ve had community meetings. We’ve had meetings with different government officials and we haven’t really been listened to.

There’s been very little community consultation on the whole thing and now a lot of those issues that we raised are actually coming to fruition when you have a look at what’s happened to the trail now.

So what have we observed?:

There’s a lot of erosion. A lot of the banks that were cut into on the ridge are falling down. There’s erosion from the trail itself that’s going down into watercourses. There are trees that have fallen down. They weren’t meant to touch any trees that were more than 20cm diameter. There are big trees that when they built the trail they truncated the roots of some trees and they’ve fallen over.

Maintenance was the issue that we put to the stakeholders, to the government people actually right from the beginning and that was never answered. There was never any comment made on who was going to maintain it once it was built and still we don’t know who’s going to maintain it and where the money will come from.

We’ve been told it could cost $150m to build, separate from maintenance costs. Over a year later, the Captain Cook Highway is still only one lane in many places. There are traffic lights all along it that lengthen the travel time from Port Douglas to Cairns. How can spending money on this trail that only a few people will use be justified?

(Maybe if they build this trail it’ll be finished before the road is, so people could walk instead of drive to Cairns).

As for the alignment, when they were given approval to build it with a lot of conditions on it, we know for a fact that the alignment where it is now, doesn’t match up with where the approvals were given. We’ve got GPS recordings; we’ve got mapping that shows in some places that it’s on a substantially different alignment.

The tourism minister, Andrew Powell, said the next stage of the trail will be better and they are listening.

I don’t really see how it can be better because when you look at the environment where they’re trying to build this thing, it’s very steep with high ridges and escarpments. There are 77 watercourses between Palm Cove and Port Douglas. There are 17 watercourses between Palm Cove and Ellis Beach that they’ve had to put bridges across.The bridges are still intact but there’s a lot of erosion of the track that they’ve built.

We’ve seen maps of the proposed alignment. Cyclone Jasper seriously changed this countryside. New approvals will have to be requested.

I don’t actually see how it’s going to be any better. It’s going to have the same impacts that this is having. I reiterate that this is the Wet Tropics World Heritage area and  the concept might be okay but when you get down to the detail we don’t believe that they’ve dealt with the detail very well at all.

People forget that this is a public place. You know this is for the public. It’s National Parks and a Wet Tropics World Heritage area. At the moment, there’s nothing there.

I have a stack of reports and surveys that I’ve read, that we’ve commented on for the EPBC referral process and they’ve identified threatened, rare, critically endangered species of flora and fauna that live in that area and they say they’re going to avoid them. Well I don’t see how they can and a lot of the work hasn’t been ground truthed. They’ve done desktop surveys and so on that don’t identify what’s actually there even though they have identified some of them.