Editor’s view: Sport and affordable housing can be great Brisbane team

The government must unlock prime land that exists around Brisbane’s suburban playing fields to help ease the housing crisis, writes the editor.

Deputy Premier Steven Miles says that as Planning Minister, he is hard at work trying to “pull every lever” to ensure the state’s housing crisis is being actively addressed.

We welcome this commitment – and suggest he engages with the idea raised by the Property Council today to look at where it makes sense to open up for development, through rezoning, the excess land currently held by sporting groups.

As we report today in our Future Brisbane series, unlocking the prime land that exists around suburban playing fields could help with housing – by developing the spaces into medium-density homes – and the sporting associations themselves by giving them the cash to guarantee their futures.

A mixed-use development built around Claremont Football Club in WA.

It is a win-win, and a proposal that has a string of easy to replicate proofs of concept interstate.

Take Waverley Park, for one example. It was the first stadium built specifically for Australian football, with the first game played there in 1970.

But after the last, in 2000, the stadium fell into disrepair. Today, all but the playing surface and heritage-listed members’ stand have been turned into housing.

There are about 50 double-storey, four-bedroom townhouse-style homes surrounding the oval – and another several hundred houses where 3500 people now live in what was the extensive carparks around the stadium.

Hawthorn AFL Football Club has meanwhile continued to use the venue itself as its training facility.

A similar approach in Perth has seen the home-ground of the Claremont Football Club now surrounded by 750 new homes in six-storey apartment buildings that flank the playing surface, which becomes a shared park for local residents when the footy is not on.

Deputy Premier Steven Miles. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen/Courier Mail

Something similar is planned in Adelaide at the site of the famous but now demolished Football Park.

The only thing standing in the way of the same thing happening here has to do with the way the land occupied by community sporting facilities is zoned – as sport and recreational. Some of these spaces are not suitable for development as they are on floodzones, but for those that are safe, there is surely a real opportunity.

Mr Miles points to the area around the Gabba as a local example, but that is missing the point.

The beauty of having homes around a playing field is that grass becomes a shared back yard for residents.

That is of course not possible at the Gabba, an in-use stadium that will be demolished and rebuilt as the main stadium for the 2032 Brisbane Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner points to his council’s work on reimagining industrial and commercial sites across the city as his example of implementing the idea.

And he is not wrong – “leftover car yards, former warehouses or unsightly old shops” could indeed be better used as homes. But again he appears to be missing the point.

Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen/Courier Mail

One of the downsides of living in an apartment is limited access to a green space where you can play some family cricket or kick the football.

Living in a building that faces into a full-sized rugby league or Australian football field open for your use other than when games or training is on changes the game, so to speak.

As we have said so many times in this column, the government must do more to work with the private sector to ease the housing crisis that continues to affect dramatically on our state’s liveability.

Mr Miles is this week doing an admirable thing and joining a housing-related study tour to Melbourne organised by the Property Council. Perhaps while there, he could request a tour of the Waverley Park development.

Nothing rough about this Australian team

There was a period there when the Australian cricket team was hard to like.

These days they are difficult not to love – and the astonishing victory in India against the home team in the World Cup on Sunday night showed why.

The Australians were up against the tournament’s only undefeated team, 100,000 or more of the most fervent fans you will ever find, and a pitch that had been prepared to favour the Indians.

And yet the Aussies proved their pluck from the moment of the coin toss, when captain Pat Cummins backed his side to chase down a score and sent the Indians in – backing in their statistics-backed hunch that bowling is for some reason tougher after dark at the Narendra Modi Stadium.

As our chief sports writer Robert Craddock – a man who knows a thing or two about cricket – writes, this match had everything from the Australians: “Planning, poise and exceptional bravery.”

It is the antithesis of the shameful days of the sandpaper affair, and further proof that – after their win in the World Test Championship final this year (also against India) – the Australian cricket team is now one of world sport’s greatest stories of redemption.

Congratulations to all involved in our record sixth World Cup win.