Queensland

Queensland exists because distance killed governance. When the colony separated from New South Wales in 1859, it wasn't ideology—it was geometry. Northern pastoralists, 1,000 kilometres from Sydney, tired of waiting weeks for decisions on land grants, stock routes, and port access. Governor Brisbane's settlement at Moreton Bay in 1824 had grown into a string of cattle stations stretching north along the coast. By the 1850s gold rush, the north wanted out. On 6 June 1859, Queen Victoria signed the separation, and Queensland became its own colony—built on distance from the start.

That distance never compressed. Queensland is 1.85 million square kilometres—seven times the size of the UK—stretched along 7,400 kilometres of coastline from temperate Brisbane to tropical Cape York. The geography creates economic zonation: Brisbane in the southeast (finance, tech, services), the resource corridor through Gladstone (LNG terminals, coal basins), Rockhampton (beef capital), and tropical Cairns (Great Barrier Reef gateway, sugar). These aren't satellite cities orbiting Brisbane—they're genuine regional economies. Townsville has 201,000 people and a port handling mineral exports. Cairns has 175,000 and processes reef tourism. Rockhampton has 85,000 and sits at the beef industry's center.

The numbers tell the story: Queensland is the most decentralized mainland state, with only 49% of its population in the capital versus 68% in other states. That's not policy—that's resources distributed across latitude. Coal in the Bowen Basin (Queensland exports half the world's coking coal), LNG at Gladstone (multibillion-dollar coal seam gas projects), sugar in the tropical north, cattle stations in the interior, the Great Barrier Reef along 2,300 kilometres of coast. You can't concentrate those in Brisbane. The industries exist where the resources are, and the cities grow there.

By 2025, Queensland's 5.6 million people generate GDP forecast to grow 2.5-2.75% in 2025-26. The economy is a portfolio: mining 11.7% of GSP, agriculture (sugar, beef, tropical fruit), tourism (the Reef alone is the region's largest economic activity), and Brisbane's finance and technology sectors. When commodity prices drop, tourism compensates. When agriculture struggles with drought, LNG exports stay steady. The portfolio effect creates resilience—imperfect correlation between revenue streams smooths volatility.

But Queensland carries an asset that's also a liability: the Great Barrier Reef. The reef generates tourism revenue, protects coastlines, supports fishing—classic ecosystem engineering, where the asset creates economic habitat for other activities. But the reef is bleaching. Climate change, driven partly by the thermal coal Queensland exports, kills the corals that attract the tourists who fund the conservation efforts. The state manages the world's largest coral reef system while operating coal mines whose product, when burned, raises ocean temperatures. By 2026, this tension intensifies: coal contracts still run decades, but reef bleaching accelerates annually. Queensland's diversification has always been geographic—tropical to temperate, coast to interior. Now it's temporal: balancing industries with different lifespans, hoping the portfolio transitions before the reef collapses.