Recently, I got my 15 minutes of fame for helping stop the proposed Trump Tower project on the Gold Coast. The reality, though, is that I was simply the public face of something much bigger: a campaign powered by hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians who decided enough was enough.
When I first heard about the proposal to build a Trump-branded tower on the Gold Coast, my immediate reaction was simple: not in our backyard. Two things instantly crossed my mind. First, I did not believe Donald Trump’s values aligned with Australian values. Whether people support him politically or not, Australia has long prided itself on fairness, respect, inclusion and a certain humility. Trump, to me, represented something entirely different.
The second concern came from my professional background as a business consultant and corporate trainer. Around the world, the Trump Organisation’s business model has left controversy in its wake. In many locations, developments tied to the brand have become divisive, politically charged and economically risky. I worried that attaching the Gold Coast to the Trump name would damage the city’s image rather than enhance it.
So, like many Australians with strong opinions and perhaps too much optimism, I started a petition on Change.org. To be honest, I didn’t think it would go very far. My mates at the pub all told me the same thing: “If Trump wants it, it’ll happen anyway.” I probably half believed them myself. Still, I figured there was no harm in trying.
What I did not realise at the time was that another petition was already gathering momentum. It had been started by someone I’ll call CK, who understandably wishes to remain anonymous out of concern about backlash from particularly aggressive Trump supporters online. After connecting, we made the sensible decision to merge our petitions. Together, our petition ultimately gathered an astonishing 142,000 signatures.
At the same time, another petition on the Queensland Government website, launched by Samantha Jennings, attracted more than 16,000 signatures. Later, advocacy group GetUp entered the fray with its own petition, which attracted another 120,000 signatures. Combined, that is almost 280,000 Australians publicly saying, “No thanks.” That level of opposition caught attention very quickly.
Before long, I started receiving phone calls from journalists across Australia. Newspapers, television programs, radio stations: suddenly everyone wanted to talk about the campaign. The story was going viral almost as quickly as the petitions themselves.
As a political candidate for the Legalise Cannabis Party, I felt this issue had clearly struck a nerve with the public and deserved more than just online activism. I knew people on the Gold Coast who were active as independent political candidates and community campaigners, so I began making calls.
To be clear, they deserve much of the credit for what happened next. They were the ones who organised locally, motivated hundreds of residents and helped build a genuinely united front on the ground. I simply planted an idea that many others nurtured into something much bigger.
At the same time, I began lobbying politicians directly. I emailed every federal MP and Senator in the country. Several members of Labor and the Greens replied positively and expressed support for the concerns being raised. I repeated the process with members of the Queensland Parliament and received a number of supportive responses there too.
I also contacted Gold Coast City councillors. Three privately indicated support for the campaign. Mayor Tom Tate, however, was not among them. Then came what I suspect may have been the tipping point.
I reached out to trade unions to gauge their position if the development moved forward. While nobody wanted to speak publicly, several representatives suggested unofficially that there were discussions about potentially blacklisting the site should the project proceed. For a major development, that kind of uncertainty is enough to make investors nervous. Whether that proved decisive or not, something clearly shifted.
Just three months after the campaign began, developer David Young and the Trump Organisation announced what can only be described as a spectacular public breakup. Both sides blamed each other for the collapse of the project. Watching it unfold felt strangely like seeing the end of a bad romance, with each side insisting: “It wasn’t me, it was you.”
Young publicly stated that he had come to realise the Trump brand had become too politically toxic in Australia. Unconfirmed reports suggested public opposition had begun scaring off investors and potential apartment buyers. Quite simply, these investors and buyers did not want to be associated with the Trump name.
When news broke that the project had been cancelled, my phone started ringing again. The media attention did not stop with Australia. I ended up speaking to international outlets, including The New York Times and The Times of London. For someone who had originally expected a forgotten online petition with a few thousand names, the whole thing felt surreal.
Needless to say, I suspect Donald Trump himself is not particularly thrilled about any of this. If rumours are true that he is furious over the Gold Coast setback, I probably should not expect a US visa anytime soon. Still, there is a bigger lesson here.
This campaign was never really about me. It was about what can happen when Australians come together around something they believe in. Hundreds of thousands of people signed petitions, thousands more organised locally, and millions likely supported the idea quietly from the sidelines.
Love him or hate him, Donald Trump managed to unite a remarkable number of Australians: just perhaps not in the way he intended.
And if there is one thing this campaign proved, it is that when Australians work together, we can achieve extraordinary things: even taking on the President of the United States and beating him.
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