Should Southeast Queensland Be Renamed?

Brisbaneites just finished debating the renaming of the Lady Cilento Hospital, which is now known simply as the Queensland Children's Hospital, and now, there's another naming debate on the horizon.

Demographer Bernard Salt has written a piece for The Courier Mail suggesting that the entire region Southeast Queensland should consider a name change.

In a piece that was published earlier today, Salt explains that the region should have a new name that's in the same vein as the Sunshine Coast or the Gold Coast "or maybe something that suggests a system of cities that work together like a clock’s cogs.

"My thinking on this issue isn’t so much to create a market-friendly term for southeast Queensland (although that is a by-product), it is to galvanise the community and the political leadership of this region into a focused force.

"Southeast Queensland is an amalgam of powerful tribes – a series of independent, and independently-minded, communities – cohabiting broadly the same space.

"Sometimes there is a greater good to be achieved for the collective by subjugating individual desires.

"Maybe building bigger motorways and more railways connecting all the bits and pieces of a disparate southeast Queensland, isn’t the way to go. Maybe the best way to organise the five million or so residents of what we now call SEQ in 2043 is to create a series of decentralised mini-me CBDs in the southern and northern suburbs of Brisbane, on the Gold Coast, on the Sunshine Coast and in Toowoomba."

Salt goes on to explain that "local political leaders wouldn’t be measured so much on what goodies they managed to snaffle from state and federal budgets for their patch, but rather on how they contributed to making the broader region a better place to live" and that a name change could significantly improve tourism opportunities for the region.

The demographer explains that the region's population is growing significantly quicker than those in Sydney and Melbourne and that a name change could improve its chances of hosting the next Olympic Games.

Southeast Queensland currently comprises of a variety of cities including Brisbane, Ipswich, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast 

Should the region's name be changed?

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