23/08/2026
A huge THANK YOU to everyone who joined BFPCA and community groups from across South East Queensland at today’s Save Our Legacy - Community Rally. 💙✈️✊
Today demonstrated that communities fighting for very different things can stand together without giving up their individual causes.
TL;DR from BFPCA’s speech: Six years ago, we thought we were fighting aircraft noise. What we have learnt since is that aircraft noise is a symptom of something much deeper – failures of governance, regulatory and state capture, engagement theatre, and systems in which powerful interests can exercise far greater influence than the communities living with the consequences.
And these problems are not unique to aviation.
A flight path can shift and affect a new suburb. A forest considered protected today can become tomorrow’s development opportunity. Public land can suddenly acquire enormous commercial value. The fight that seems unrelated to you today could arrive in your community tomorrow.
That is why solidarity matters.
When one community raises concerns, it can be dismissed as another isolated local dispute. But when communities fighting completely different battles begin describing the same patterns of power, influence, failed consultation and disregard for community voice, a much bigger picture emerges.
Different communities. Different issues. Same pattern.
Together, we make that pattern visible – and together, we are much harder to ignore.
Thank you to the organisers, volunteers, speakers and everyone who showed up today to make their voices heard.
👇 Below is BFPCA’s speech from today, together with some photos from the rally.
✈️ PEOPLE BEFORE PLANES.
Good morning everyone.
Thank you Gaja Kerry for the beautiful Welcome. I add my respects to Elders past and present. And I thank the organisers for bringing us together. I’m here from BFPCA – Brisbane Flight Path Community Alliance. But in my day job, I’m a professor at QUT, so I’m very used to standing in front of students and giving 2 – 3 hour lectures off the cuff. Today they’ve given me 5 min — so, for everyone’s safety, I’ve written it down.
And thank you all for being here — and for successfully navigating the temporary fencing at King George Square to find us this morning. I suspect quite a few people here have become unexpectedly experts at navigating temporary fencing lately.
But before I go on, I want you to do something this morning. Talk to the person standing next to you — especially if they’re carrying a sign for a different campaign. Ask them what they’re fighting for. And ask them what happened when they tried to get government to listen.
I suspect you’ll discover very quickly why we’re all standing here together today. We’re fighting for parks. For forests. For koalas. For public land. For cultural heritage. For our neighbourhoods. And, in our case, for communities subjected to relentless aircraft noise.
On the surface, these look like completely different fights. They’re not. Because sooner or later, we start asking the same questions:
• Who actually makes the decisions?
• Who gets listened to?
• Who gets the benefits?
• And who is forced to carry the costs?
When BFPCA started six years ago, we thought we were fighting aircraft noise. We were wrong.
Aircraft noise was what woke us up — sometimes quite literally at 3 am in the morning. But the deeper we dug, the more we realised that noise was a symptom. We dug deeper, and we found a system in which industry, corporations, regulators, government agencies and political decision-makers have become extraordinarily intertwined.
What we ALL are dealing with has a name: State capture. That’s what happens when powerful private interests become so deeply embedded in the institutions and networks of government that public decisions increasingly serve those vested interests instead of the public. It’s not just lobbying. It’s not just paying money to get a meeting with a Minister. It’s when the people who are supposed to regulate powerful interests become entangled with the very interests they’re supposed to regulate.
And one of the ways communities experience that is through: Engagement theatre. That’s when institutions invite us to workshops, surveys, submissions and consultations — giving us the appearance of participation — while the decisions that really matter have already been made. Because those powerful vested interests have gotten to the decision-makers first.
BFPCA has experienced six years of it. And I suspect quite a few people here recognise it too. We’re now seeing consultation on the Victoria Park Master Plan while we have already watched trees coming down.
This learning journey has changed what BFPCA fights for. Airservices Australia is a government-owned corporation, but its operating model is funded by — and deeply embedded in — the aviation industry it serves. Today, we’re launching a national campaign calling for Airservices to be brought back under direct public control and direct democratic accountability. Why? Because eventually you realise that you cannot solve a structural problem by endlessly treating its symptoms.
And if you think this is only aviation’s problem, consider what’s happening with Brisbane 2032.
Different industry. Different issue. Disturbingly familiar governance model.
Government creates an arm’s-length authority — GIICA — gives it extraordinary powers to deliver Games infrastructure, suspends 15 pieces of state legislation that Parliament created to protect us, limits avenues for review or dissent, and even vests public land in that authority so it can get on with delivering the stadium. Think about what that means.
State capture doesn’t always look like somebody handing a politician a brown paper bag. It is much more sophisticated than that. Corporate, industry and government interests become so closely aligned that the institutional machinery of the state itself is redesigned to facilitate a particular outcome. And then we are told that outcome represents the legacy in the public interest.
Yet communities are watching governments prepare to bulldoze a legacy in order to build one.
• Bulldoze mature trees and habitat.
• Bulldoze cultural and ecological values.
• Bulldoze established protections.
• Bulldoze community consultation when communities give the wrong answer.
You cannot bulldoze the things we inherited and call what replaces them a legacy. A legacy is what we leave to the people who come after us — not what we destroy before they get here.
Why should we care about fights that aren’t ours? Because: None of us knows where the next fight will appear. Flight paths shift — and suddenly another street, another neighbourhood, another suburb discovers what aircraft noise actually means. A forest that seems protected today can appear on a developer’s roadmap tomorrow. Koala habitat that seems safe today can become earmarked for urban sprawl and expansion. Public land that generations assumed belonged to the community can suddenly acquire enormous commercial value.
The fact that they haven’t come for something you love yet doesn’t mean they won’t. That’s why protecting somebody else’s legacy today helps protect yours tomorrow.
And that brings me to the most important lesson we’ve learnt. Powerful interests already understand collective strength. They build networks. They share intelligence. They cultivate relationships. They amplify one another. They work across organisations and across governments. Meanwhile, communities are encouraged to stay in our little boxes. That fragmentation is their advantage.
Because: when one community says something is wrong, it can be dismissed as another local dispute. But when communities across South East Queensland — fighting completely different battles — start describing the same patterns of power, influence, failed consultation and disregard for community voice… We become evidence.
Together, we make the pattern visible.
The powerful have understood collective strength for a very long time.
It’s time communities did too.
• So let’s fight to protect our parks.
• Protect our forests.
• Protect our wildlife.
• Protect our neighbourhoods.
• And we’ll keep fighting for the communities under Brisbane’s flight paths.
But when they come for somebody else’s legacy — show up. As you did today.
Because next time, it could be yours.
Thank you.
