As of last week, some bureaucrats somewhere have officially classified our four Southern Moreton Bay Islands (Lamb, Macleay, Russell, Karragarra) as ‘remote’. Of course, many of us choose to live here because the bay waters give us a certain desirable remoteness from what passes as the oxymoron ‘Australian civilisation’ these days, but I wouldn’t have thought being only six kilometres from mainland Australia and less than forty kilometres from Brisbane’s GPO seriously qualified as actually ‘remote’ (see below for the real perspective rather than the confected silliness above).
Mind you, some islanders think this classification is great news, because it means that our local council and other organisations can now grovel for government grants of between twenty grand and ten million bucks from something called the ‘Building Better Regions Fund’
to support ‘projects which involve the construction of new infrastructure, or the upgrade or extension of existing infrastructure that provide [sic] economic and social benefits’. The catch is that the fund only provides some of a project’s cost.
Okay, so I can’t speak for the other three islands, but Lamb Island definitely doesn’t need, say, a freeway, or any other major infrastructure. Although maybe spending a few government bucks on a map for the bureaucrats could be a good investment, because it seems like they haven’t really got the remotest idea of where we are or what we’re about.
