Opinion & analysis

I have spent the past two years mapping every fatal crash on the Bruce Highway between Cairns and Townsville. The pattern is grim and repetitive: single-vehicle run-offs, head-on collisions on overtaking lanes, and a small cluster of black spots that have been black spots for a decade.

Federal and state governments have jointly committed billions to upgrades. Almost none of that money is being spent on the cheap, fast interventions the evidence supports: wire-rope median barriers, audio-tactile line markings, and rest area expansion at the points where driver fatigue spikes.

Instead, funding is concentrated on a handful of large interchange projects in Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast. Important work — but irrelevant to a truckie pulling into Innisfail at 3am.

If we cannot bring forward the small, proven safety upgrades on the Far North leg, we are accepting these deaths as a cost of doing business. We should not.

I want to make a confession. For most of my career as an environment reporter, I softened the language used by reef scientists to make stories more palatable to the tourism industry. I am not proud of it.

The Daily Cairns will not do that. When AIMS calls an event catastrophic, we will print catastrophic. When the Climate Council says a bleaching threshold has been crossed for the fifth time in nine years, we will lead with that number.

This is not activism. It is accuracy. The reef supports 64,000 jobs in Queensland and contributes $6.4 billion a year to our economy. The people whose livelihoods depend on it deserve a clear-eyed account of its condition.

Polite coverage has not protected the reef. Honest coverage might at least prepare the region for what is coming.