| Mount Isa City Council
Mount Isa City Council | A cultural COMMUNITY Tony McGrady first arrived in Mount Isa back in 1963. At 18-yearsold, he had emigrated from Liverpool in the United Kingdom to Sydney, but had heard of two places a man his age could earn a lot of money – the Snowy Mountains Scheme in New South Wales, and the Mount Isa Mines in Queensland.
| Mount Isa City Council
Mount Isa City Council | “I literally flipped a coin, and it came down on the side of Mount Isa,” he recalls. He travelled to Brisbane to interview for a job in the mines. After being accepted, he took a train from Brisbane to Townsville, then from Townsville to Mount Isa. The trip took roughly two days. At the time, there were a lot of European migrants who – like him – had traded away the luxuries of city and coastal living in order to make a better life for themselves in a remote community. Mount Isa’s people and country lifestyle appealed to McGrady and kept him around. After a short time, he joined the Australian Labor Party, where he was given a lot of early opportunities to learn and grow – opportunities he never would have received in the city. In 1973, he leveraged that experience in order to run for, and win, a seat on the local council. In 1985, he was elected as Mayor, before moving into state politics in 1989. In the years since McGrady arrived, Mount Isa has evolved into the administrative, commercial and industrial centre of Queensland’s vast north-western region. While the city has grown bigger and more
| Mount Isa City Council
Mount Isa City Council | A SPECIAL COMMUNITY modern in that time, much remains the same. Mount Isa is still the premier mining city of Australia, and its multi-cultural make-up has continued to make it unique. Over time, McGrady has himself served the needs of this unique city as State Labor member for Mount Isa, and has been Minister for Resource Industries, Energy, Mines, Police and Corrective Services, innovation and State Development and Speaker. After retiring from state politics, he was again elected Mayor of Mount Isa in 2012. Today, Mount Isa has all the comforts, shops and services that one would expect to find in a modern city – combined with the sense friendliness and community that comes with being in the country. “Mount Isa is a very special type of community,” Mayor McGrady says. “The people are unique. There is a special friendship among countrymen you don’t always get in the city.” “I can walk into any shop, hotel, pub, club or down any street, and everybody knows me and says ‘Hello, good day, how are you?’” he says. “That’s something you don’t find everywhere. When I became a Minister, I walked into the lift in Parliament House. Of course,
| Mount Isa City Council
Mount Isa City Council | the lift was full, and I said ‘Good morning.’ Not one single person acknowledged me. They didn’t acknowledge anybody.” “When you live in country Queensland, you have a far better ability not just to meet people, but to make friends,” he adds. “That makes life more interesting.” Mount Isa is also home to people from a mix of backgrounds and ethnicities, which also makes things interesting, Mayor McGrady says. In the past, he recalls performing naturalisation ceremonies for many candidates from Europe and the Philippines. Today, he says the majority are coming from New Zealand, the continent of Africa and the sub-continent of India. “That’s one of the major changes I’ve witnessed,” he says. “But we’ve always been a thriving industrial community with people from many different nationalities, all living and working free from racial strife.” The other major change, Mayor McGrady explains, has been the slight downturn in the resources sector. In recent years in particular, Mount Isa Mines was taken over by Glencore, which made some people uncertain
| Mount Isa City Council A MORE LIVEABLE CITY about the future. On top of that, the Century mine – Australia’s largest open zinc mine, developed in 1997 – is about to close, along with some other smaller mines. “But that’s natural,” Mayor McGrady says. “In the mining industry, you know that the ore body of a mine will one day run out of ore. It’s one of life’s three certainties, along with death and taxes.” “But I’ve been here since 1963, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in that time, it’s that the resources sector has its peaks and troughs,” he continues. “While we may currently be in a trough, it will turn around, and the greatest days of north-west Queensland are still ahead of us. That’s my honest belief.” Currently, one of Mount Isa City Council’s main goals is encouraging more people to come, settle down and live in the city. Mayor McGrady is opposed to the concept of ‘fly-in, fly-out,’ and he – along withMount Isa Mines, the Mount Isa Chamber of Commerce and the rest of the CityCouncil – have worked closely together to come up with an alternative. “We got together and we appointed consultants to come to us with a plan as to what we could do to make Mount Isa a more live-
Mount Isa City Council | able city,” he explains. “Those consultants have been to town, they’ve interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people to learn their aspirations and ideas and they have developed a plan to make the city more liveable.” “That plan covers every angle,” he adds. “It covers sports, the arts, culture – you name it, and it’s covered in the report.” Three years ago, Mayor McGrady told Business World his dream was to make Mount Isa “a more livable city.” Today, that dream is well on its way to becoming a reality. “We now have in place an organisation whose sole role is to ensure we do become a more liveable city,” he says. “The other thing we’re doing along the same lines is we – Mount Isa City Council – have entered into agreement with the QueenslandMusic Festival. We’re now being seen not just as the one of the world’s greatest mining communities, but as one of Queensland’s most cultural cities.” As an example, he cites the recent QueenslandMusical Festival event inMount Isa. There was a choir and an orchestra of
| Mount Isa City Council roughly 500 locals, aided by professionals from New York and other places. Last year, they also had an opera staged in the city which employed roughly 300 locals as part of the chorus, held workshops in every school in the city and conducted a special performance for school children. “We also had Troy Cassar-Daley, James Morrison and a whole series of singers join with 500 Mount Isa school children, who wrote and sung the Mount Isa song,” Mayor McGrady says. “The last three years we’ve had a number of massive cultural activities like that.” Other examples of those activities include live simulcasts of American Ballet Theatre’s Swan’s Lake, a performance by the Queensland Ballet and symphony orchestras. “This has all happened because of our new relationship with the Queensland Music Festival,” Mayor McGrady says. By making Mount Isa a cultural destination as well as a mining one, the City Council hopes to encourage more people to become part of the community, and not just
Mount Isa City Council | come for work. “The reality is that fly-in, fly-out workers make little-to-no contribution to the community,” he says. “They just fly-in, earn their dollar and come back from whence they came. I don’t want to start World War III with fly-in, fly-out people, but when you talk about community, it’s essential that you have a static one where people who live there participate in community activities such as rotary clubs, lions clubs and the CWA.” “Having said that, I have to be fair to Mount Isa Mines,” he clarifies. “They don’t engage in the fly-in, fly-out practice. That practice has been engaged in by smaller mines surrounding Mount Isa.” When the current Council was elected in May 2012, they made boosting the economy through new business investment another one of their main priorities. On their second day in office, they even had signs erected outside the administration centre saying ‘We’re open for business again.’ According to Mayor McGrady, the city THE FUTURE IS HAPPENING
| Mount Isa City Council has faced its share of challenges in the time since, but the future looks promising. “It’s easy to be a leader when things are going well – and that applies to everything from a local rotary club to the local council, all the way to the state and the nation,” Mayor McGrady says. “In my case, we just came through one of the worst draughts on record. Our lake – which the city and the mines rely upon for their water – was down to 20 per cent. We were forced to pump from another lake 70 kilometres away at great costs.” “So we’ve been through difficult times, just as a result of mother nature,” he continues. “But we’re still open for business, and as a Council we’re doing everything we can to encourage business.” In recent years, Mayor McGrady helped develop the North West Regional Plan in collaboration with the then-state government and all major employers and councils in the area. Under his chairmanship, they worked together to come up with a plan that recommends what can be achieved not just when it comes to mining, but water, agriculture, housing, tourism and more.
Mount Isa City Council | “The new Minister for Mines and State Development came through last week, and I gave him a copy of this plan,” Mayor McGrady says. “So the new government is aware of what we’re trying to do, andwe’re all working on promoting the North West and making it a strategic part of the development of Queensland.” In the long-term, Mayor McGrady says his vision is to develop Mount Isa as a liveable country city with plenty of opportunities available to future generations. “Many of the seeds we have planted have already grown and materialized,” he says. “The city’s future is happening now. We’ve given our people the opportunity to perform and witness the best singers and ballet dancers in the world. We’ve already moved the city away from being regarded as simply a mining community. We’re now regarded as a mining and cultural community.”
| Mount Isa City Council
Mount Isa City Council |
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