The former Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told bureaucrats charged with planning for the 2032 Olympic Games in Brisbane that they would be run “the Queensland way”.
Through the course of just this week, the state government has ripped up its unpopular designs for new and upgraded major stadiums, ignored the (more expensive) suggestions of its own review, and chose instead to plan a low-cost Olympics at existing venues.
The 100m final will be held in the smallest athletics stadium since Amsterdam’s in 1928, out in the Brisbane suburbs, with little established public transport access. Across the road is a self-storage facility and a liquidated furniture outlet.
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The plan is heavily backed by John Coates, the Australian Olympic supremo. Coates pioneered this “new normal” at the International Olympic Committee – the idea that cities should not build white elephant stadiums to host the games – and then promoted Brisbane as a safe pair of hands to run a games at existing venues.
A few months after the Brisbane Olympics were announced, Coates told the National Press Club that the IOC had been impressed by the bipartisanship in the Queensland bid. It was backed by local, state and federal governments.
“My role has been to make sure we present a united front,” Coates said.
“And that’s what we’ll do for the next 11 years”.
But in the three years since Brisbane was first identified as the preferred host of the Games – and as the clock ticks down towards the opening ceremony at Suncorp Stadium (or maybe the Gabba, or floating down the “brown snake”, as the Brisbane River is known) – Olympic planning has become hostage to faltering public support and a series of political power struggles.
Public servants working with knowledge of the government’s plans for infrastructure say work so far has been “half-baked and half-arsed”.
“The main venues have become mired in selfishness, chaos and mayhem,” one insider says.
‘No process of talking to people’
Government sources suggest the first moment the Olympics went off-track came in 2018 – three years before the unspectacular Covid-era announcement that Brisbane would host the games.
At the time, Palaszczuk had been blocked from speaking at the opening ceremony of the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, in favour of one of her predecessors, Peter Beattie, who had run the organising committee.
Palaszczuk wrote a speech anyway and sent it out on the eve of the event.
“It was discussed openly that [the] brawl with Beattie over the Gold Coast was part of the reason the state government wanted to keep control of Olympics planning,” a state government source said.
The government’s unilateral decision to rebuild the Gabba stadium – an oval ground used for cricket and Australian rules football – for the opening ceremony opened a political wound that has festered since.
Ted O’Brien, the former Morrison government special envoy for the Olympics, says that announcement “nearly killed” the city’s bid for the games when it “blindsided” everyone.
“It flew in the face of everything we were pitching to the IOC about avoiding a big spend on venues and it also broke faith with the people of Queensland who had been assured the 2032 Games would not become a spendathon with taxpayer money,” he says.
Palaszczuk’s next decision – reneging on a promise to establish an independent infrastructure authority and instead managing major projects inhouse, AKA “the Queensland way” – is described by one bureaucrat as “a fatal mistake” that has hampered planning since.
“We’ve got the wrong structure, the wrong people, [and] costs are escalating,” the bureaucrat says.
“There has never been any long-term strategy to it – no process of talking to people about how that would be developed and what legacy items would be”.
Last year, the state government launched a website, Q2032.com.au, promoting business opportunities for the Games and venue plans which have since been abandoned.
“The [Games] organising committee had no idea this had gone live and wasn’t even consulted,” a source says.
‘We broke the golden rule’
As the stasis took hold of behind-closed-doors Olympics planning, the Games became the source of local political power struggles.
The Brisbane city council and the state government established competing Olympics offices and “no one really seemed to know what either of them did,” an insider says.
By the time Palaszczuk retired last year, the working relationship with the Brisbane lord mayor, Adrian Schrinner, had broken down completely. Schrinner had withdrawn his support for the Gabba rebuild and quit a planning committee.
One state minister says the idea of a key venues review, headed by the former lord mayor Graham Quirk, was devised in order to “get Schrinner back onboard”.
But it backfired when Quirk came back with an idea that was more expensive: to build a new stadium in public parkland at Barrambin, at the northern end of the CBD.
“We broke the golden rule that you don’t commission a review unless you already know the outcome,” a Labor MP says.
On Sunday – a day after taking a battering in two state byelections – the government leaked the Quirk report to a couple of media outlets, which reported on the idea of the new stadium.
The next day, it rejected the idea outright. Labor sources say they were “happy to pick a fight”.
“Rejecting the plan for a shiny stadium is not all downside,” one minister says.
Another Labor figure says the “huffing and puffing” from media outlets, most notably daily newspaper the Courier-Mail, about Olympic plans was “out of step with community attitudes”.
“Imagine telling regional Queensland to wait for infrastructure while we build a new stadium,” he says.
The IOC, for its part, said this week that “size doesn’t matter” and that the Olympics must adapt to the host city, not the other way around.
‘Closed doors decisions don’t work’
Much of this week’s discussion has been about “legacy”. Could less ambitious plans, like upgrading the suburban, 1980s-era Queensland Sport and Aquatic Centre, squander the very point of hosting the Olympics in the first place?
Steve Wilson, a former chairman of the South Bank Corporation, which manages Brisbane’s popular precinct, had been among those pushing for the Victoria Park redevelopment.
“It’s illogical to appoint an independent, well-respected committee of three people … to do a full review, spend 60 days, a lot of money and effort, and instantaneously reject it,” Wilson says.
“I do believe we’ve still got time. We can all look back and say that there’s a lot of time that has been wasted, but the good news is we’re now getting a serious public conversation.
“Closed doors decisions don’t work. Decisions made within hours of getting a review don’t work. We need to take a chill pill and, frankly, it would be better if decisions are made after the election”.
Urban planner Mark Limb, from the Queensland University of Technology, says the Olympics feels like a “huge wasted opportunity” to engage the community about plans and legacies.
“All the key reasoning and decisions have been kept behind closed doors,” Limb says.
“There was a lot of real goodwill when the Olympics was first announced. The government could have harnessed that if they’d had a great engagement policy. Every planning consultancy in the city would have wanted to have a crack at that.
“But they missed … that chance, they screwed it up.”
This week the opposition Liberal National party, under pressure to declare a hand, announced it would build no new venues if, as expected, it wins government in October.
The entire saga has opened up a discussion about how Queenslanders – a notoriously parochial mob – see themselves.
The Games was supposed to be a coming of age for a state with a chip on its shoulder; a city once dubbed “a big country town” that could now be listed after London, Rio, Tokyo, Paris and Los Angeles as an Olympic city.
Do we need our own version of the Stade de France? Or are we comfortable with the idea that Olympic Gold track medals will be handed out a few javelin throws from the Mount Gravatt cemetery?
“There’s a reason a Queensland smile is that little bit broader, why we walk that little bit taller. It’s the pride we feel about our home,” Palaszczuk would have said at the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony, if she had been welcome to speak.
On Thursday, Olympic swimming champion and Brisbane local Tracy Wickham told the Australian the Games should be given to Sydney.
“I just don’t want Australians to be made a fool of and we will be, people will talk about it forever,” Wickham said.
