Business petitioner says Nambour deserves better treatment

Jennifer Barker says Nambour deserves more attention from authorities.

Nambour Now Community Meeting

Nambour business owner Jennifer Barker’s petition to Sunshine Coast Council was passed unanimously on November 13, 2025 but the follow-up left her frustrated.

Ms Barker owns two small businesses in town. She told a public meeting into safety and homelessness, organised by the Nambour Now group, that she launched the petition after her property – about 3.5km out of town – was impacted twice: once by a homeless person and once by someone suffering from addiction. She described both incidents as “very confronting”.

However, she said her petition to  Sunshine Coast Council for more local funding was met with a “thank you” and an “out of date” budget document.

“Four weeks I waited. The response I received was a thank you and a copy of the current budget … and it is actually out of date,” Ms Barker said. She said she had since asked for budget funding from other divisions so that she could do a comparison but was still awaiting a response.

Ms Barker said the visible pressures in Nambour – homelessness, addiction, anti-social behaviour, displacement and empty shops – were not appearing out of nowhere, but followed “lack of affordable housing, lack of coordinated services, and lack of long-term planning”.

“People sleeping rough in our parks, doorways and car parks are not the cause of Nambour’s problems,” she said. “They are a symptom of wider systematic failures. Ignoring them or pushing them somewhere else does not solve anything. It just shifts the problem down the road.”

She said businesses were feeling the impact, with staff feeling “unsafe at times”, customers staying away and families often feeling afraid in public spaces.

The meeting also heard Nambour’s cancelled library redevelopment raised repeatedly as a symbol of uneven investment. 

Community development worker Peter Hogg told the crowd the promised Nambour Library upgrade had been progressively pushed back before being cut after council “discovered… a big black hole in their budget”.

Mr Hogg contrasted that with a major refurbishment of the Caloundra library, saying the facility had since attracted heavy foot traffic.

“We were supposed to have the same kind of redevelopment for Nambour Library,” he said.

Ms Barker said basic infrastructure was being overlooked. “Our pavements are a disgrace,” she said, describing difficulties for elderly residents and people with disability in parts of the CBD.