No Incinerator for Scenic Rim October Update

Hi No Incinerator for Scenic Rim supporters. Here's your October update from the campaign team.  

It’s been a very busy month with lots of public and behind the scenes action happening.

Thank you for the great turnout at our rally on 10 October in Davidson Park Beaudesert. Photos and head counts confirm there more than 200 concerned community members were in attendance on the day. Be sure to check out the FB page for the many great photos, and inspiring signs created for the event. 

The campaign team has received confirmation from the Scenic Rim Regional Council that our petition will be tabled at their council meeting tomorrow Wednesday 28 October. Process is that the councillor in whose division the matter resides, will table any petitions. In our case, that will be Cr Sanders.  

We were also planning to ask a few questions and make some requests on the day, however, we have not been able to get agreement from council that we can do so. We have let them know that denying us a voice risks their reputation, community and civic leadership responsibilities, and impacts our human rights. 

Community voices matter, and they’ve not allowed us even five minutes to speak to the petition.

We do though have two questions which will be asked during the public question time. 

If you haven’t done so already, please sign, and share our online petition with your family, friends and work colleagues.

This is not the final count for our petition (currently nearing 4,500 online signatories) as we will be keeping it going to continue to gather numbers of community opposition, but loads more signatures before the morning would be marvelous. We also have more than 600 signatures on our hard copy petitions, giving a current total of over 5,000. 

Thank you to those who’ve hosted those petitions and worked in your communities to get signatures.

The Have Your Say period for submissions to the Office of the Coordinator General closes Monday 16 November.  All the information you need is available here, with links to our stackplume webtool, templates and sample submissions. It’s vital that every submission is ‘properly made’ to be counted. There are rules, and they’re all spelt out there. If you have any trouble, please get in touch.

Thanks to the technical team who have created the great webtool. This is a first for Australia and will hopefully be able to help other communities in the future as well.

Please be sure to get at least one submission in before the 16 November deadline. You are able to make more than one submission. There’s a lot of issues you may like to cover! And please encourage family and friends to get their submissions in too. Every single one sends a message and our voices must be heard and counted!

The team will be at the Beaudesert markets again on 7 November - please come, spend some time ... and talk with the community about this highly toxic proposal that threatens our beautiful Scenic Rim.

Big news! We will soon have coreflutes available to get the message out and about around the region, but remember they need to go on private property, so it would be perfect if you have a very visible location to put them up. Putting them on public land risks their removal by council or opponents.   

Thank you to all who donated at the rally to make this possible.

They’ll be available at the Beaudesert markets along with our badges and bumper stickers, or contact us direct to get yours asap and make a statement on your property, or ask permission from other residents.

Cleanaway held their AGM in Brisbane last week. Members from the two campaigns fighting Cleanaway’s BERC (Bromelton) and MERC (Melbourne) proposals were in attendance. As reported in the media, two Scenic Rim residents asked some curly questions and received interesting responses from their CEO. 

At Cleanaway’s AGM on 22 October 2026, CEO Mark Schubert made two important statements about the proposed incinerator projects:

1. Environmental and regulatory stress testing is not yet complete. Responding to a Scenic Rim shareholder’s question, Schubert acknowledged that Cleanaway had not reached the stage of comprehensively stress-testing project emissions, future environmental standards and regulatory changes. He also confirmed that the Board had not made a final investment decision and that development and approvals work was continuing. 

2. Community support is explicitly recognised as a project requirement. Responding to another shareholder, Schubert acknowledged that community support and social licence are relevant to project decisions. He stated that Cleanaway considers gaining local community trust and support to be the proponent’s responsibility. 

Source: https://earningsapi.io 

The day before the AGM, the Premier was the keynote speaker at a QLD Media Club event sponsored by Cleanaway. Held during Safe Work Month, it’s astounding to think of the disconnect between the position of our elected officials and a company with such a poor compliance record with five deaths in just two years. It asks lots of questions about this relationship. There’s many pics again on our facebook page of the many people protesting Cleanaway’s poor workplace health and safety record outside that event.

In other news, we have discovered that CoMSEQ, the SEQ Council of Mayors, of which the Scenic Rim Regional Council is a member council, wrote to the ACCC about certain submissions lodged during their consultations.

CoMSEQ have asked the ACCC to discount 27 individual submissions because many “substantially reproduce a small number of template texts” and because most submitters live in the Scenic Rim. We are not aware of any rule that restricts who may make a submission to the ACCC, or where they live. We think the people most likely to carry the detriment of a regional waste facility are the people best placed to describe it. Where a submission is accurate, it does not become less accurate because others made the same point.

They also ask the ACCC to give weight to ‘an application by 11 councils’. Eleven councils lodging one application, drafted by one firm of solicitors, under one memorandum that names CoMSEQ as project lead, is the same concentration of voice that CoMSEQ criticise in residents. Weight cannot be reduced for shared content in one case and increased for it in the other.

Luckily this was discovered and the campaign team are on to it. We are very disappointed to learn that the SRRC was a party to this communication, and we ask how they think they are representing their community ??

The Coordinator General’s deadline may be the last opportunity to have a formal say on this project, but our No Incinerator campaign cannot be silent.

Be sure to make the most of the tools available, get your submissions in before deadline and together let’s Keep the Scenic Rim Scenic!

Thank you from the

Keep the Scenic Rim Scenic
No Incinerator for Scenic Rim Campaign Team

No Incinerator for the Scenic Rim blog
No Incinerator for Scenic Rim! Facebook Group
No Incinerator for Scenic Rim! Linktree