A CRUISE company is planning to build a tourist island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
Although the plans for the island include a four-storey building, cafes and a conference centre, Sunlover Cruises, the Cairns-based company behind the scheme, claims it will have “no discernable impact on the reef’s ecology”. Rob Palmer of the Wilderness Society in Cairns disagrees. “The reef is a World Heritage site partly for its aesthetic values,” he says. “You whack a four-storey building on it and you’re going to ruin it.”
The island would be located about 50 kilometres east of Cairns in the Moore Reef…
