The Tate of Queensland: Right Time Tom, the wheeler dealer mayor

Independent Australia makes an important new revelation about the recent purchase of a Gold Coast bowls club site by the City's Mayor. Founder Dave Donovan reports.

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

IA would like to apologise to both readers and Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate for consistently referring to him, in 14 previous otherwise impeccable investigative articles (listed HERE), 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”, as is reportedly one of his mottoes. Nor is being lucky. Another may be, "you make your own luck", which he belligerently told a reporter while being questioned on 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 all — for years being desperate to add another one to the Gold Coast. But for now, let’s just call him "Right Time Tom".

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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 convinced the State of Queensland to deliver him their quarter of the former Bowls Club land for a song($2.05 million) in 2016 — although 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-storey residential tower, the Surfers Plaza Resort, which looms over it. The Bowls Club greens, which languish weedily, woefully untended to this very day, are elevated from street level ─ a sort of greenish icing on the top of the Resort’s 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 Club would permit the Resort’s residents to use some of its 150 car parks.

This was all written into a successful development application for the Bowls Club, approved by the Council in 1987. But not with Right Time Tom after he was elected Gold Coast Mayor in 2012.

Tom Tate: The 'Crackerjack' mayor

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, subsequent to the Tate consortium acquiring the Queensland Government's quarter of the land, Resort residents were protesting in the streets. But why would the wheeler-dealer, just-re-elected mayor be worried about angry local ratepayers?⁽²⁾

Now, all Right Time Tom had to do was secure the remaining 25% of the bowling greens to take over the 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 wasn’t 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 called Waterglow. 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 called Dale 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 Council’s stake in the former Bowls Club — and he rejected every one of Tate’s bids.

Is Dale Dickson the hero of this story? Not really. Because in April 2021, he ceased to 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 instalment of 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 Tate is that it came as something of a surprise at the time to in-the-know locals. That was because he was regarded as being something of a Tate apparatchik. Certainly, he shared Right Time Tom's pro-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 Tate’s 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 or not the carpark conditions were accommodated – Dickson stood in the consortium's way was because Tate’s offers were always too low to satisfy the Council’s statutory responsibility to get full market value for the City’s ratepayers. Buy low and sell high, remember? That’s 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 is here:

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 available here.)

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 2020 article, ’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 and February 2022 – before current CEO Tim Baker was 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 experienced bureaucrat, but necessarily a less experienced CEO, and one who would presumably be less knowledgeable than someone more easily swayed by a long-serving mayor, who the seemingly steadfast, previous CEO (bar one), Dale Dickson, had reportedly described as the most powerful person on the Gold Coast. ⁽³⁾

This is the real revelation:

What that section means is that before 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 Resort a 'reasonable and relevant' provision of any contract of sale for this council-owned 25% 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 Tate’s media adviser, Warwick Sinclair, to which Dickson was responding in 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 Council’s consent — rather illegally, according to certain readings of the essential Queensland Local Government and Planning acts.

So, in 2021, less experienced CEO McCabe, acting on an interim basis, became the new sole negotiator for Mayor Tate’s own Council’s 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 had changed. No such legal advice referred to by that section of the Minutes, nor any probity report, has ever emerged.

Independent Australia attempted to contact current Gold Coast CEO Tim Baker about this matter, but we were told he was on leave and couldn’t be reached for comment. We also asked to speak to Joe McCabe, but were told by the Council’s spin doctors that he hasn’t 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 wouldn’t mind a chat. We are not suggesting McCabe knowingly 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 the scandal-embroiled CEO of the affluent, inner western Melbourne municipality of Stonnington. 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 associate Turner Engineering the 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 Turner had been a frequent purchaser of 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 via A Current Affair and 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 wasn’t.⁽⁴⁾

3. Lastly, the prediction

Finally, we come to the prediction, which is more than just a simple prognostication, but is backed up by reliable sources. IA predicts 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 tell us 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 hadn’t 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.

FOOTNOTES

¹Brief summary of Bowls Club swindle
A Chamber of Commerce member came to a struggling local Bowls Club and told its members his “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's Commerce Club front for their company, Crestden, bought the clubhouse and all its pokies for $1.4 million.
Fair price, who knows? It wasn’t 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 of unpaid management fees ($0.77 million) without spending another dime. It was just the right time (not to be a lawn bowler).

² Re-election Theory
One theory as to why Tom Tate keeps getting elected despite constant scandals and 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 called David Edwards to become the Gold Coast’s new CEO.
Edwards served in that role for just three weeks before 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 anyone’s guess, given Tate has been found guilty of civic misconduct 14 times over his 13 years as mayor, to date.
Edwards, the son of former Queensland Liberal Leader Lew Edwards, the long-serving Deputy Queensland Premier during the even longer reign of gerrymander king Joh Bjelke-Petersen, is clearly a rank amateur when it comes to withstanding modest amounts of public opprobrium.

⁴ Liberal 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 Premier Will 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 of Invest Gold Coast — an outsourced former Council planning department, which under Tate, is now a nearly autonomous Queensland development body directed by a band of super-wealthy developers. These include LNP crony of Stuart "Rolex" Robert fame, Sohail "Sunland" Abedian, and Gerry Harvey's (of Harvey Norman) wife, Katie Page.
You won’t believe what we have discovered about this quango and its alleged links to the “hot money” flowing in from offshore interests, we alluded to in this story a 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...