General News
3 June, 2025
Plan causes disharmony
TWO Cairns regional councillors have failed to overthrow the organisation’s latest reconciliation action plan (RAP) which they described as divisive and racist.
Crs Matthew Tickner and deputy mayor Brett Olds sought to reject the ‘CRC Innovate Reconciliation Action Plan 2025 – 2027’ but were outvoted 2-8.
“In my opinion this is fairy floss policy – high calorie, appears large in volume, but in reality, is made from a small amount of sugar and has no nutritional value,” Cr Tickner told Wednesday’s fortnightly council meeting.
“It’s a vanilla, box-ticking exercise designed for corporations like ours to stand behind and say ‘look how great we are – we are doing stuff’, yet in practice this plan provides little in the way of localised, targeted actions that make any significant impact to the community we represent.
“In fact, numerous items within this plan will only work to further divide, further spend and further progress the ideology of virtue signalling over action”.
Cr Tickner said the plan had “rather ludicrous goals” including:
‘Identify and record staff who attend First Nations celebrations like NAIDOC week’. “The only assumed result of this would be to then apply pressure to the names not on the list who weren’t attending,” he said
Hard percentage quotas placed on how many council staff have to identify as First Nations within council ranks
Hard percentage quotas on local procurement activities to be awarded only to First Nations run companies.
Additional ratepayer funds towards even more culture heritage monitoring on all capital works projects – further increasing the cost of projects.
Cr Tickner said the plan included “an overwhelming amount of fluff about ‘encouraging’ staff to wear First Nations T-shirts and attend First Nations cultural training seminars”. It also identified existing locations like parks, streets, creeks to re-name with Indigenous names – “not, in my opinion, supported by the majority of the community”.
“Further embedding Welcome to Country ceremonies – costing the ratepayers thousands of dollars every year,” he said.
Cr Olds said the plan had the potential to create division and “ultimately was a racist policy”
He said people should be treated equally, not on the basis of the colour of their skin.
Cr Brett Moller, who moved the motion, said the council had a RAP policy for 14 years and “this was not a new journey”.
He said it was well known that First Nations people were the most disadvantaged in terms of employment, imprisonment and living in broken homes.
Cr Moller said reconciliation was a two-way street of “coming together and moving forward”.
The council’s only indigenous councillor, Trevor Tim, said it was “a very important document” and “we councillors should be leading from the front (on reconciliation)”.
