The overwhelming mandate delivered to Bob Abbot and his policy platform in Saturday’s poll makes clear that Sunshine Coast residents finally recognised the opportunity afforded by forced amalgamations.

There is nothing ambiguous about the size or uniformity of the support the former Noosa mayor received across the region for his policies of sustainability and open governance.

Voters took the opportunity to rid themselves of former councillors who had demonstrated by the way they voted on crucial decisions and in their interaction with the electorate that they were out of step with both its expectations and aspirations.

Local Government Association of Queensland executive director Greg Hallam said on Monday that the result delivered a message the state government needed to hear loud and clear.

He said it was an example of anti-developer sentiment that was rife across the state’s growth corridors.

In the past 30 years, Noosa has shown itself to be the only Sunshine Coast council willing, in its planning deliberations, to place sufficient weight on the impact of development on the natural environment.

Despite their almost constant whingeing about the restraints placed on them, particularly in Maroochy, the truth is that developers have enjoyed a rails run, with elected representatives too often showing a willingness to water down planning department recommendations to enhance the short-term profits of a few.
It is not, nor ever should have been, the responsibility of any level of government to justify through its planning decisions the price paid for a block of land.

Mr Abbot will find his vision has many, many supporters among Maroochy and Caloundra staff.

Noosa’s strength has long been that the unambiguous expectations of the community were reflected in the policy settings of its council and their implementation by both staff and the elected representatives.

If you thought you heard a massive release of breath coming from the bowels of Maroochy shire’s administrative headquarters in Nambour on Monday and saw a rainbow forming overhead, you were not mistaken.

Saturday’s vote comes with an enormous level of community expectation that old cultures will be put to bed for good.

No councillor elected on Saturday should have any doubt about the overwhelming support for Bob Abbot and his policy platform.

There are no pockets of resistance to the cultural change he has promised to implement. There is not a polling booth on the Sunshine Coast that did not afford him a handsome majority.

Despite that mandate, do not think for a moment that the whining will stop. Special interest groups long used to being able to argue away any attempts to balance the imperative of their profit margin with environmental empathy will not take lightly erosion of their long-held opportunity.

It is time they listened and adjusted to new realities. It is long time, as Mr Hallam said, for the state government to also listen and to adjust to those realities.

Despite the continued disarray of her opposition, Premier Anna Bligh’s mandate will quickly disappear if she chooses to cut this and other regional councils out of the planning process to better facilitate the growth, growth, growth mindset unaltered since the days of Joh Bjelke Petersen.

It is just plain wrong that this, or anywhere else for that matter, can accommodate growth indefinitely without the loss of environmental integrity and sense of place and community.

The SEQ regional plan and infrastructure plan pretend to be the very model of good governance. They are not.

They are documents that, in the main, facilitate the growth and profit projections of a small group of large land bankers.

The plans afford no investment in environmental infrastructure. New roads and transport corridors to service new developments will trump a wildlife corridor or biodiversity every single time.

So-called infill development which effectively means the replacement of the old Residential A zonings with the right to knock down homes and replace them with unit blocks will erode sense of community every time.

No one should be under any illusion that Mr Abbot, and the team elected to form the first council in a new era of local government, can simply wave a magic wand and satisfy the full weight of community expectations.

The next four years are critical to this region’s future. The administration and elected representatives must quickly reach an understanding of the direction forward while ensuring the community has a clear understanding of the rationale behind its decision making.

And then it must come to terms with a state government whose use of language often obscures the real intent of its policy settings.