CEO’s Report

Leigh Cunningham

Beautiful one day; perfect the next then drought, bush fires, cyclones and floods. It’s been a challenging time again for our sector with further pressure on already stretched resources and with restoration expected to take month. years in some regions. Our thoughts are with everyone now immersed in recovery programs. It is certainly a time for us to remember that every community needs its engineers.

Our thanks to Dereck Sanderson, SWQ Branch President for the cover of this issue of Engineering for Public Works taken 26 February at Ravensbourne on the Esk-Hampton Road.

The chronic shortage of experienced public works engineers will continue to influence our longer-term sustainability with funded projects unable to secure people resources or competitive bids from suppliers. The schedule of works for the Games, particularly now that resources will be diverted to recovery for some time, may be at risk. And what if these extraordinary floods arrived a week out from the 2032 Games? The last major flooding event in Brisbane was 11 years ago; the Games are 11 years away. Hopefully we are not on a new 11-year cycle.

The theme for March of the 2022 Every Community Needs an Engineer (ECNE) calendar is ‘engineers enable our economy’ and that is especially true at this time. The February floods have wiped $1 billion from the Queensland economy and the speed at which we are able to recover will depend on how quickly communities return to functioning as normal and that will depend on the expertise of our engineers.

One initiative to attract engineers to our sector, is the Public Works Queensland Expo to be held in September. Engineers from anywhere including recent graduates, retirees, those engineering other sectors, and those who left our sector, will be invited to attend the Expo in Brisbane to discover why they should live in Queensland and work in our sector. Potential employers – councils and consultancies – will have opportunities to inform, connect and influence attendees. Another initiative launching this month, and a longer-term strategy is the Adventures in Engineering picture book series for students in Years 4, 5 and 6 (ages 8-10). Read more about the project on page 10. The six storybooks showcase real life civil engineers delivering real-life projects for our communities. Our thanks to Juliet Schaffer, author of the stories, and to Narissa Amies, the illustrator who captured our engineers and their projects in a way sure to interest readers.

The Annual Conference this year marks 50 years since our formation in October 1972. Please make a diary note for 11-13 October 2022 and join us in Brisbane for the celebration of our organisation from its origins as the Local Government Engineers’ Association of Queensland (LGEAQ) to IPWEAQ and IPWEAQNT which will emerge over the coming months. We hope to have our colleagues from the Northern Territory join us for this milestone event.

In the meantime, I look forward to seeing you at a branch conference – Gladstone, Toowoomba, Mackay or Palmerston, or at the Asset Management Symposium in Brisbane in April. Take care of yourselves and each other.

Annual

CONFERENCE

Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre 11-13 October 2022

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