Cairns Base Hospital should never have been allowed to stay on its present cramped site, a former local MP who decided to keep it there has admitted.

Former state treasurer and Labor member for Cairns until 1998 Keith de Lacy has told The Cairns Post he regrets not fighting harder against strong public pressure to keep the hospital on the Esplanade and insist that a new one be built on a bigger greenfields site.

“It was the wrong decision but I fought that many battles in Cairns with the casino, Cairns Central, the railway station, the Central School,” Mr de Lacy said.

“Every one was a battle and I probably lost the heart for another one.

“But the bloody nonsense of having a view over the sea, they all impute you have ulterior motives, that it was an attempt to get my hands on a prime piece of real estate and sell it off.”

But Mr de Lacy, who spent 16 years in parliament and now sits on boards of several large companies including Macarthur Coal and Queensland Sugar said it was not too late to build a new hospital somewhere else.

His comments come as support continues to pour in for a community campaign launched by The Cairns Post for a new hospital.

“Of course, it would have been better to build it back then because of all the expenditure that’s been put in,” he said.

“But it goes without saying … we need a new and properly constructed hospital on a new site.

“That site is no longer adequate and we will always have second-hand health services if the hospital remains there.”

He said there were a lot of financial and budgetary considerations that needed to be taken into account and “you don’t always get everything you want”.

Newly retired federal Liberal member for Leichhardt Warren Entsch said rebuilding on the old site was “a stuff-up” and “grossly inadequate” from the start.

Mr Entsch said the preferred option should be to secure land in the southern growth corridor for a new hospital.

Although he understood the benefits of co-locating with the James Cook University at Smithfield, he said the hospital needed to benefit the bulk of the population and year-round access could not be guaranteed if it was built on a floodplain.

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