General News
21 April, 2026
Time ticks towards deadline
COMMUNITY submissions on the future of Babinda’s public pool close in two weeks’ time and pool users have been urged to have their say before it’s too late.
The town has been campaigning to save the pool since the end of last year when the community found out Cairns Regional Council had earmarked the facility for “end-of-life” retirement as early as this year.
Recently Bondi rescue star Bruce ‘Hoppo’ Hopkins joined the fight when he visited to conduct Float to Survive lessons at the pool.
Babinda Taskforce, which is finalising a major submission to save the pool, will ask council to at least extend the pool’s life by a year – and then also fully investigate options of how the facility can have a longer-term future.
“We would like them to be looking at options for funding a new facility or upgrading the current one to a standard that gives it at least another 10 years in life,” Taskforce president Dalitta Wright told The Observer.
“It would obviously take engineers to come and have a look at it and see what’s actually going on with it,” she.
“But the advice from Ian Lee, who was with Bruce Hopkins, the Bondi Rescue guys who were here a couple of weeks ago – just in looking at it, he seemed to think that on face value, there should be no reason why it couldn’t be maintained for an extended period of time.”
The public submissions close on the 30 April and anyone who has yet to have their say on council’s ‘aquatic facilities strategy’ – which singles out only Babinda pool for retirement – has been urged to do so before the cut-off date.
“There will be a timeframe between the closure of the submissions and when council then give the officers time to review the submissions that have come in and then there will be a report that goes to council at some stage,” Ms Wright said.
“I guess what the community wants is that it happens relatively quickly.”
Ms Wright is concerned that when the pool is closed as is normal procedure for winter – either at the start of May or June – that the public will not know if the pool will be re-opened again.
“Marlin Coast (the pool’s operator) have got two different dates on their website, so it’s either the first of May or the second of June, depending on which one is accurate,” she said.
“We don’t really want the pool to close without an outcome, but potentially it will happen. And then we are hoping, optimistically, hoping, for an extension to the life of the pool beyond the 2027 date – that’s within the strategy.”
The key, she believes, is getting council officers to change their recommendation from retiring Babinda pool to giving it extended life, before the aquatic strategy document is put to a vote.
“The first thing that council needs to do is change their recommendation so that the pool has an extended life, and they can then start to do these investigations, but do it in a way that they actually believe in its future, as opposed to decommissioning as soon as possible,” she said.
“We are continuing to encourage people to put submissions in.
“The taskforce is pulling together its final submission over the course of the next week or so. We will be releasing that to the public on 20 April.
“The purpose of that release is to show the community that we have incorporated their comments into our submission, or at least identified the themes of their comments, so that council understands where the community as a whole sits on this one.
“The community of Babinda and surrounds have been very supportive of the Taskforce through this whole process, and we do invite them to either come down to the office after the 20th or to have a look on Facebook at our submission that will be going to council, just so that they can actually see the outcome.”
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