Independent Australiamakes an importantnew revelation about the recent purchase of a Gold Coast bowls club site by the City's Mayor.FounderDave Donovanreports.

THIS ARTICLE is going to be as brief as possible. In it, we aim to do just three things: first, make an overdue apology; second, provide an important revelation; and third, make an informed prediction.

1. Firstly, the apology

IAwould like to apologise to both readers and Gold Coast MayorTom Tatefor consistently referring to him, in 14 previous otherwise impeccable investigative articles (listedHERE),as the developer Mayor. Because we can find no evidence that he has ever developed a single property in his life. Inherited and acquired property by various means, certainly, but not to our knowledge, ever developed one.

Despite possessing a civil engineering degree from a Sydney institution (which we have confirmed), as far as we know, Tate has only ever traded property, never enhanced it. But buying land low and selling high is not illegal, nor is being in the right place at the right time,asis reportedlyone of his mottoes. Nor isbeing lucky.Another may be,"you make your own luck", which he belligerently told a reporter while beingquestionedon national TV about acquiring the last piece of the formerly community-owned Surfer's Paradise Bowls Club from the Gold Coast Council for a fraction of its market value.

Perhaps we could call Tate the Dealer Mayor? He is a fan of casinos, after allfor years being desperate toadd another onetothe Gold Coast.But for now, lets just call him "Right TimeTom".

Successful investigations take more than money, resources and shoe soles, they also take public support and big hearts, writes founder David Donovan.

2. Now for the revelation

In 2005, it was evidently the right time for Tom to begin to ingest a local, community-owned bowls club. But how he perfectly and legally kicked the lawn bowlers out for next to nothing, taking 50%of the greens, is not a revelation. We wrote about that in 2016 (HERE)and it is a notorious national scandal.(1)

Also not a revelation is that Tom, as mayor, somehow convincedthe State of Queensland to deliver him their quarter of the former Bowls Club land for a song($2.05 million)in 2016although it is, admittedly, a lesser-known detail.

An even lesser-known non-revelation is that the former Bowls Club is fundamentally connected to an adjoining 15-storeyresidential tower, theSurfers Plaza Resort, which looms over it. The Bowls Club greens, which languish weedily, woefully untendedto this very day, are elevated from street level a sort of greenish icing on the top of the Resorts intended subterranean carpark.

The Resort was built in 1989,and the clever developers built a car park, covered it with gravel, sand, loam and grass and sold it to a bunch of locals who wanted to play lawn bowls for some ungodly reason. Sold it, probably to pay off the building costs and tidy sum, though under the condition that the Bowls Clubwould permit theResorts residents to use some of its 150 car parks.

This was all written intoa successfuldevelopment application for the Bowls Club, approved by the Council. But not with Right Time Tom. So by the time Tate became mayor in 2012, the Bowls Club was gone and, as he owned 50% of the greens, so he presumably gained the right to 50% of the Resorts 150 parking spaces. Leaving not very many for the Resort's 166 units.

Gold Cast Mayor Tom Tate has been accused of lying about a controversial development project in which he has a major conflict of interest.

Indeed, subsequentto theTate consortium acquiring the Queensland Government's quarter of the land, Resort residents wereprotesting in the streets.But why would the wheeler-dealer, just-re-elected mayorbe worried about angry local ratepayers?(2)

Now, all Right Time Tom had to do was secure the remaining 25% of the bowling greensto take overthe entire extinct Bowls Club, unencumbered. And it just so happened that Lot 6, 72 Remembrance Drive, was owned by the Gold Coast City. And he was the mayor! Just at the right time! What luck!

Except it wasnt the right time. Not when the Tate Consortium offered to buy the remaining 50% he didn't then own in 2013, with all the car parks included as part of a development he was hawking calledWaterglow. And not for all the subsequent years up until 2021, with or without the car parks attached.

All because of one man:a former VFL footballer calledDale Dickson, the Gold Coast City CEO from 2003 and for the subsequent 18 years. Dale Dickson was the sole person the Council appointed to negotiate the sale of the Councils stake in the former Bowls Club and he rejected every one of Tates bids.

Is Dale Dickson the hero of this story? Not really. Because in April2021, heceasedto be the Gold Coast CEO after effectively being ousted by Mayor Tate. We will tell you a lot more about the murky and sordid details of that, which include anti-corruption inquiries, bullying allegations, misconduct findings and, to cut a long story short, everything except dancing girls which one may find quite easily, coincidentally, within easy walking distance of the Surfer's Paradise Bowls Club.

The somewhat tragic tale of Dale, a complicated character, will be found in a future instalmentof this investigation, 'The Tate of Queensland', which we will be rolling out in a serialised format over the coming weeks and months. We have a lot of material already and are finding out more all the time.

What we will say about Dale Dickson being a roadblock to Tateis that it came as something of a surprise at the timeto in-the-know locals. That was because he was regarded as being something of a Tate apparatchik. Certainly, he shared Right TimeTom'spro-development fixation. But he was an experienced bureaucrat and, reputedly, a professional one who knew the planning and local government acts backwards, sideways, upside down and even via a mirror image reflection. Reliable sources inform us that Dickson rejected Tates entreaties to sell Lot 6 because to do so may have been in breach of his duties under the law.

And Dickson has never been found to have been corrupt, or even to have committed a single act of misconduct, despite several corruption allegations being investigated against him over his long career. Most likely whether with or without the carpark conditions being accommodated because Tates offers were always too low to satisfy the Councils statutory responsibility to get full market value for the Citys ratepayers. Buy low and sell high, remember? Thats the way Right Time Tom rolls.

But there was another reason, too, which did relate to those pesky carparkers at the Plaza Resort.

Is that the long-awaited revelation? Almost.

The revelation ishere:

Not that whole dry page of these confidential (yet freely available) City of Gold Coast's'811 Meeting of the Governance, Administration and Finance Committee Minutes',obviously. (Complete minutes of that meeting availablehere.)

Not even this bit of the page:

That just confirms what everybody already knew: that Tom Tate, on occasion, simply lies. Something we categorically explained in this 2020article, 50 blatant lies and broken promises by Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate.

The Tate consortium did not have an unconditional offer for the non-Council-owned portion of the former Bowls Club in June 2021, as those minutes proudly asserted. We know that because he still owns the other 75% of the land he had in his hand at the time of the meeting.

The date of the meeting, 18 November 2021, is important.

The date is important because between April 2021 andFebruary 2022 before current CEOTim Bakerwas appointed the City of Gold Coast was without a formal CEO. The then COO,Joe McCabe,served as interim, acting CEO on a part-time basis. McCabe was an experiencedbureaucrat, but necessarily a less experienced CEO, and one whowouldpresumably be less knowledgeable than someone more easily swayed by a long-serving mayor, who the seemingly steadfast, previous CEO (bar one),Dale Dickson, hadreportedly describedas the most powerful person on the Gold Coast.(3)

This is the real revelation:

What that section means is thatbefore June 2021, the Gold Coast City Council during the sole negotiations for Lot 6,Remembrance Drive, conducted by CEO Dale Dickson, via the Council's ownership of the property considered the continued provision of 49 car parks to the Surfers Plaza Resorta 'reasonable and relevant'provision of any contract of sale for thiscouncil-owned25% portion of the Bowls Club.

But then, Dale Dickson departed, after a certain amount of attempted attrition by Tom Tate, aspects of which led to an anti-corruption inquiry in 2018-19,Operation Yabber,which we will talk about in a future instalment. We will also discuss other serious, baseless allegations by Tates media adviser,Warwick Sinclair, to which Dickson was respondingin 2020, on the eve of fighting to retain his job after having to reapply for it.This was based on a new employment contract for which Tate had gained the Councils consent rather illegally, according to certain readings of the essentialQueensland Local GovernmentandPlanningacts.

So, in 2021, less experiencedCEO McCabe, acting on an interim basis, becamethe new sole negotiator for Mayor Tatesown Councils holdout piece of his precious property dealing dream that last bit of the Surfer's Paradise Bowls Club, over which Right Time Tom had spent 16 inexorable years, by this time, slowly wrapping his slavering, viperous jaws.

According to interim CEO McCabe with or without the advice of his designated advisors in such matters, the Council-appointed probity officer and/or official City solicitors the Planning Act had changed. McCabe said that legal advice had been received suggesting these provisions were, unlike the previous eight years under Dale Dickson, no longer relevant and presumably unreasonable.

However, there were no changes to the Planning Act to suggest the legal position hadchanged. No such legal advice referred to by that section of the Minutes, nor any probity report, has ever emerged.

Independent Australiaattempted to contact current Gold Coast CEO Tim Baker about this matter, but we were told he was on leave and couldnt be reached for comment. We also asked to speak to Joe McCabe, but were told by the Councils spin doctors that he hasnt worked for the Council for a few years.

Indeed, McCabe left in August 2022, not long after his brief stint as acting CEO. He is now CEO of Townsville City Council but we wouldnt mind a chat. We are not suggesting McCabeknowingly acted improperly. More than likely, he was placed in an unenviable position by a very powerful player(or players)and was left with little option but to comply, after which he departed.

We have also attempted to contact Dale Dickson, who, after a short time as acting Mt Isa CEO,is now thescandal-embroiledCEO of the affluent, inner western Melbourne municipality ofStonnington. He has not yet returned our calls.

The sale of the last unencumbered piece of the former Gold Coast Bowls Club was duly delivered to frequent City Council associateTurnerEngineeringthe following June, in 2022.The Council accepted its tender of a modest $1.9 million, despite one of the errant councillors letting slip to the media that the parcel of land was independently valued at $5 million.Michael Turnerhad been a frequent purchaserof Council allotments. Since this transaction, he subsequently secured the sale of 62 hectares of nondescript and previously unwanted land near the highway in the outlying suburb of Nerang.

Turner was touted in the papers as planning a medical facility for his portion of the former Bowls Club at the time of his 2022 purchase, but that was not the case. Because in August 2025, we found out viaA Current Affairand an independent Freedom of Information request, that Turner had, in fact, sold this lot to (who else?)the guy who owned the rest of the greens, Mayor Tom Tate whose previous unconditional sale had seemingly fallen through!

Two decades was the long time Right Time Tom had spent imbibing the Bowls Club, and casually spitting out the bones of old bowlers and longtime Surfers Plaza Resort residents. Now he had it. The sale could still have been stopped in 2022, as current Council CEO Tim Baker took over in April 2022. But for some reason or another, it wasnt.(4)

3. Lastly, the prediction

Finally, we come to the prediction, which is more than just a simple prognostication, but is backed up by reliablesources.IApredicts that Tom Tate has already sold the entire former Bowls Club land allotment and this will be revealed very soon. Our well-placed, trusted and always impeccably reliable sources tellus the Bowls Club has been contracted to a very wealthy interstate property developer, whose name many people will immediately recognise.

But we have not been able to confirm this assertion neither the sale nor the identity of the buyer. So it is as yet unconfirmed. A mere prediction. But the prediction that the land has already been sold, to whoever it may be, wherever in the world, is not rash nor idle speculation. It is well-informed. Because, as we have said, Tate is not a developer.He is a property opportunist.

We would be stunned if he hadnt sold the site years ago and was just waiting for the final piece to fall into his ever-grasping hands.

There is more to come ... much, much more.

1 Brief summary of Bowls Club swindle

A Chamber of Commerce member came to a struggling local Bowls Club and told its membershis Commerce Club (not related to the Chamber of Commerce in any way, though it does sound a bit the same) could make it profitable.

He convinced Bowls Club members he and his mate Kelvin could turn the clubhouse around and somehow make holidaymakers want to go barefoot bowling rather than nearly nude at the beach. So Tom and his mate'sCommerce Clubfront for their company,Crestden,bought the clubhouse and all its pokies for $1.4 million.

Fair price, who knows? It wasnt for the members because he promptly closed the clubhouse, the only profitable part of the club, and in 2007 took over the members' greens (50% of the land) in lieu ofunpaid management fees ($0.77 million) without spending another dime. It was just the right time (not to be a lawn bowler).

2Re-election Theory

One theory as to why Tom Tate keeps getting electeddespite constant scandalsand is not worried about angry residents in CBD high rises losing their parking privileges, is because a large proportion of the civic population of the Gold Coast are relatively affluent (that is, mostly Liberal Party-voting) retirees from interstate, living in suburban bungalows well outside the CBD, whose only interest in local politics is protecting their nest eggs.

Tate is seen as a successful businessman and is an honorary lifetime Liberal Party member, and that is all they seemingly need to know. He is now in his fourth term as mayor.

3Gold Coast Council's many CEOs

In between Dale Dickson ceasing his role as Gold Coast CEO in early March 2021 and COO Joe McCabe taking the reins as interim acting CEO at the end of that same month after a nationwide talent quest for a new CEO Tom Tate and his fellow councillors appointed someone calledDavid Edwardsto become the Gold Coasts new CEO.

Edwards served in that role for justthree weeksbefore resigning for health reasons. These seemingly arose after he was sensationally exposed as being found guilty of five counts of misconduct in a similar previous role. Why that was enough to make him feel so sick is anyones guess, given Tate has been found guilty of civic misconduct14 timesover his 13 years as mayor, to date.

Edwards, the son of former Queensland Liberal LeaderLew Edwards, the long-serving Deputy Queensland Premier during the even longer reign of gerrymander kingJoh Bjelke-Petersen, is clearly a rank amateur when it comes to withstanding modest amounts of public opprobrium.

4Liberal Party Pedigrees

Pertinent to this discussion are a few more details relevant to Tim Baker. Baker is the former chief of staff, a political appointment, of former Tasmanian Liberal PremierWill Hodgman. So it is unlikely that when he was considering approving this sale, he had the encyclopaedic knowledge of the Queensland planning and local government acts possessed by holdout CEO Dale Dickson. This made Baker the right man at the right time for Mayor Tom Tate.

Also pertinent to mention here is that Hodgman is also now the head ofInvest Gold Coastan outsourced former Council planning department, whichunder Tate, is now a nearly autonomous Queensland development body directed by a band of super-wealthy developers.TheseincludeLNP crony ofStuart "Rolex"Robertfame,Sohail "Sunland"Abedian,and Gerry Harvey's (of Harvey Norman) wife,Katie Page.

You wont believe what we have discovered about this quango and its alleged links to thehot moneyflowing in from offshore interests, we alluded to inthis storya fortnight ago, though you can be assured it will all be true, because truth is what we do.More about Invest Gold Coast in future episodes...

FollowDave Donovanon X/Twitter@davroszand [email protected],and Independent Australia on [email protected], X/Twitter@independentausand FacebookHERE.

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