General News
11 February, 2026
Road group to set priorities
A FUNDING commitment by the Department of Transport and Main Roads to seal a section of the Bourke Development Road (BDR) has been welcomed by Member for Cook David Kempton.
The news, revealed at a Mareeba Shire Council meeting in January, confirmed the TMR had told a traffic advisory meeting it was sourcing funding to seal the 3.5 km dirt section of the road from Almaden to Chillagoe.
“The Bourke Development Road has been underfunded for a number of years,” Mr Kempton said.
“It’s dangerous, the gravel - you get into a bit of a slide, there’s a lot of fatalities on it. You also see cattle properties getting landlocked; there’s mums with their young kids isolated there.
“I support it, seal it as it is, and set the speed limit.”
His response comes as he prepares to conduct the first meeting of the much-anticipated Transport Advisory Committee, which is to be held at the Mareeba International Club on 19 February.
Mr Kempton pledged during his election campaign in 2024 to create the committee in a bid to develop an influential and cohesive group to advocate for the long-term future of the region’s crucial road network.
“It doesn’t just involve transport operators, there’s a lot of other people that work on roads, are affected by the quality of the roads, have long-term historical knowledge of blockages and so on,” he said.
“So, I want to make sure it’s a really broad school, and what comes out of the group, the reports that go to government ... can (be relied) on in terms of the priorities and investment.”
He said that over the past decade, underfunding had been a problem for the region, and what had been funded had not been ideally targeted.
“I’m not blaming the TMR, they do the best they can, but I think we can do better in a planning sense, in a priorities sense, and in the cost-benefit from the funds,” Mr Kempton said.
“We don’t want any more $100 million overruns on Archer River bridges, we don’t want any more cassowary overpasses at Tully, we don’t want any more $40 million spends on cameras on the range. We need to get the money on the road.
“If we can get these things prioritised to advise government, so they are not just relying on TMR and others, so there’s clear community input and feedback, I think it’s really worthwhile.”
The advisory group is expected to meet quarterly, and Mareeba Shire Council will be the secretariat, “so it will be well structured”, he added.
Some of the key areas of interest included the Almaden bypass and the Mareeba bypass, the latter being “critical for the future development of this town”.
“There’s an opportunity for a transport hub, a distribution hub. Given the wet season, we often find we can’t distribute goods and services beyond Townsville,” Mr Kempton said.
The Peninsula Development Road would also need to play a part in creating opportunities.
“We want to look into just what the long-term future of the PDR is, in terms of getting cost benefit for the money being spent,” he said.
He lamented the lack of truck stopovers, which were dangerous for tired drivers, and the “work that needed to be done on road classifications and heavy vehicle legislation”.
“We need to widen and strengthen McLeod, Spear and Rifle Creek roads to enable road trains to come right in. They are a major access to the north, between Julatten and Mareeba,” he said.
“There’s no point having more and more bitumen going north if you can’t get to Lakeland and Cooktown.”
Mr Kempton said the many alternatives to the Kuranda Range Road that continued to plague government needed to be culled, and a clear timeframe should be explained for the building of the Barron River Bridge.
“Yes, I’d like to understand that one,” he said. “That’s also what this group is for.”
