Olympic powerbroker needs to front Senate inquiry

Other than Premier Steven Miles himself, nobody has shouldered the responsibility for the state government’s bizarre decision to host the Olympic Games at a school athletics carnival venue more than John Coates.

Australia’s Olympic supremo was front and centre of Miles’ justification for knocking back a proposal to build a new stadium at Victoria Park, in favour of a temporary facility at the Queensland Sport and Athletics Centre at Nathan.

Olympics powerbroker John Coates and Queensland Premier Steven Miles. The pair spoke in the days before Graham Quirk’s final report on Olympic venues was released.Credit: Collage

The Victoria Park option was the main recommendation of former lord mayor Graham Quirk, who Miles hand-picked to head a review into Brisbane 2032 Olympic venues.

The Quirk report was released early one Monday morning, just over three weeks ago. By lunchtime, Miles had kiboshed its flagship recommendation.

Agree or disagree with the decision – and my position is pretty clear – it needs to be fully understood by the Queensland public, which deserves better than Coates’ refusal to answer questions before a Senate inquiry into Australia’s preparedness to host the Games.

Given the hold Coates has had over two Queensland premiers – from publicly ordering then-premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to attend the Tokyo opening ceremony while Queensland still had COVID restrictions, to Miles’s deference over stadium selection – his role needs to be properly scrutinised.

After all, if Miles puts more stock in Coates’ opinion than an independent review he himself commissioned, it suggests the Sydney-based sports administrator is all but running Brisbane’s show.

The new premier’s move to have an independent review of Olympic venues was a welcome one, particularly after Palaszczuk’s top-down approach invested so much of the government’s political capital into a Gabba rebuild, before any real costings could be made.

It was a refreshing display of pragmatism, a demonstration that the Miles government would be more consultative – that it would take the advice of experts, rather than stubbornly stay the course in a bid to save face.

But, when presented with that expert advice, Miles dismissed it out of hand and followed Coates’s lead – it was the Olympic boss who, in February, publicly floated the idea of hosting track and field at QSAC after meeting with Quirk as part of the review.

The problem with that, though, is the competing motivations of Coates and Quirk’s review team. Where Quirk was tasked with determining what was best for Brisbane, Coates’s driver has always been what is best for the Olympic movement and, more specifically, his legacy within it.

Coates was the driving force behind the International Olympic Committee’s “new norm” reforms, in which an Olympic Games would fit a host city, rather than the host city having to fit the Games.

He wants to show the world the Olympic Games does not have to be an expensive boondoggle for host cities. Stung by criticism from previous editions, notably Athens and Rio de Janeiro, the new norm was designed to make Olympic hosting a more attractive option for cities.

It was a sign from the IOC there was no need to build shiny new stadiums that would become white elephants post-Games.

But any new stadium in Brisbane – be it at Victoria Park, the Gabba or elsewhere – would not be a white elephant. It would not be a stadium built for the Olympic Games, then left to gather dust (as QSAC was after the 1982 Commonwealth Games).

It would be needed in the medium-to-long term regardless of the Games – a lack of a suitably sized stadium was a big reason Taylor Swift gave us a swerve this year – Brisbane 2032 would simply be the catalyst to getting it done.

Queensland’s stadium uncertainty has caused consternation among Brisbane’s business community, concerned the city was letting a golden opportunity slip through its fingers.

Rod McGeoch, one of Sydney 2000’s chief architects, said last week Brisbane still had time for a course correction.

“I think the sooner the election is on and we’re clear about who’s in charge, and we get the right sort of people organising to do it, it’ll be fine,” he told 4BC.

Perhaps. But Brisbane has had more time than any other city to prepare for the Games and we’ve already squandered almost a quarter of that so-called “green and gold runway”.

And if the past few weeks have shown us anything, it’s that Queensland’s political class is incapable of delivering an Olympic and Paralympic Games. While the Labor government has bungled its way through the delivery process so far, the LNP opposition shows no sign of being any better.

Opposition Leader David Crisafulli has promised yet another review into Olympic venues – this one 100 days – but that review would not consider any new stadiums, even if that was the most cost-effective option, as Quirk’s review found.

When you have both would-be premiers singing from the Coates new-norm hymn sheet, his power is obvious.

“They talk of legacy ... the sports legacy is just as important as the ability to have Taylor Swift concerts,” Coates told this masthead last month, in defence of the QSAC decision.

“It’s a very good plan ... [Brisbane] does not need to build a new stadium at $3.4 billion.”

That might be right, but it’s not Sydney-based Coates’s call to make.