Bleijie promised to respect local decisions. Our MP's need to help us hold him to it.
Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie says he wants to "restore respect for councils" and end the old habit of "riding roughshod" over local decision-making. Those are his own words, announced alongside his planning reforms this year.
Toowoomba is about to find out if he means them.
Our new planning scheme — with the tree and habitat protections our local government spent months mapping, consulting on and voting through because our community has advocated for them for over thirty years — goes to the State Government in October. Once it lands on the Minister's desk, he can quietly strip those protections out before they ever take effect.
We've seen exactly this happen before just last year. Ipswich had its biodiversity protections for urban areas with important habitat wound back in February 2025. Gympie lost protections across roughly 75% of its rural land Koala habitat in February 2026. And on the Darling Downs earlier this year, farmers only kept their Condamine Alluvium water protections after a hard fight — the government had first proposed stripping them out, and only backed down when landholders pushed back loudly enough. He has also proposed a Critical Minerals Bill that allows him to push through any development he wants without community or landholder objection rights.
The pattern is clear: protections get quietly wound back unless enough people speak up first. So let's speak up first — before October, not after.
Email your local MP today
It takes two minutes and it matters.
Here's what to ask them to do:
Toowoomba is about to find out if he means them.
Our new planning scheme — with the tree and habitat protections our local government spent months mapping, consulting on and voting through because our community has advocated for them for over thirty years — goes to the State Government in October. Once it lands on the Minister's desk, he can quietly strip those protections out before they ever take effect.
We've seen exactly this happen before just last year. Ipswich had its biodiversity protections for urban areas with important habitat wound back in February 2025. Gympie lost protections across roughly 75% of its rural land Koala habitat in February 2026. And on the Darling Downs earlier this year, farmers only kept their Condamine Alluvium water protections after a hard fight — the government had first proposed stripping them out, and only backed down when landholders pushed back loudly enough. He has also proposed a Critical Minerals Bill that allows him to push through any development he wants without community or landholder objection rights.
The pattern is clear: protections get quietly wound back unless enough people speak up first. So let's speak up first — before October, not after.
Email your local MP today
It takes two minutes and it matters.
Here's what to ask them to do:
- Publicly commit to protecting Toowoomba's tree and habitat protections when our planning scheme reaches the Minister's desk in October — and to oppose any move to water them down.
- Hold Minister Bleijie to his own commitment to "respect councils" and "strengthen local decision-making." Toowoomba deserves the same respect he's promised elsewhere in the state.
