Mike O’Connor: Premier wedged over Olympic venue but Victoria Park decision correct

The politics behind Brisbane’s 2032 Games has been driven by feelings over facts. There has never been a plan, and while Steven Miles is copping flak over his decision to rule out Victoria Park, it was the right call, writes Mike O’Connor.

Those fluttering sounds you can hear are the political pigeons of the state government coming home to roost.

There was never a plan to stage the Olympics that no other city in the world was interested in holding. Into this void stepped then Premier Palaszczuk, driven by ego and the deeply flawed presumption that it would be politically popular.

When the confected cheering and gasps of surprise at the announcement our bid had been successful subsided, everyone went home and carried on as before.

There was no strategy. The Games? No worries, mate. They’re years away.

The former QEII Stadium, now Queensland Sports and Athletics Centre, at Nathan has the government’s backing.

Premier Steven Miles in now wedged firmly between a rock and a very hard place for behind all the uproar about his rejection of some aspects of Graham Quirk’s report lies the unpalatable truth that the government never had a mandate to pursue the Games and that a sizable majority of Queenslanders simply do not want them.

Miles has copped a caning for ruling out a stadium in Victoria Park but it was the right decision.

It’s a park. A green oasis. It’s one of the lungs of the city. Would New Yorkers tolerate the construction of a sporting stadium in Central Park? You know the answer.

Developers have been casting longing glances at Victoria Park for decades but the Brisbane City Council knew that to succumb to their whispered entreaties to despoil it would be political suicide.

Come the Games and suddenly it’s seen as acceptable to send in the trucks and bulldozers as a motley collection of former politicians, entrepreneurs, architects, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers tell us what to do with our city and where to do it.

Then Deputy Premier Steven Miles and Kate Jones in 2023. Picture: Adam Head

Legacy has become the most over-used word in the lexicon. We are constantly told that we need a legacy. Legacy for whom? For politicians, for the developers and business people who stand to profit from these projects when the circus that is the Games leaves town?

We need to step back and take a breath and be wary of those who would use the Games as a cover to override the regulations which are designed to give us a certain quality of life.

Former Labor state politician Kate Jones, who hasn’t been elected by anyone to anything but who has plenty to say, warned us in a speech last week that to stage the Olympic Games “we’re going to have some difficult decisions to make,” adding that we shouldn’t “politically protect” some suburbs and that there had to be “bravery” in political decision-making.

There are laws and regulations which are designed to stop big business and big government trashing citizens’ quality of life so they can do whatever they like such as flattening parklands to build sporting stadiums.

These restrictive planning regimes are well named because they restrict people from destroying our lifestyles but in so doing restrict governments from giving the nod to big corporations to make lots of money at our expense.

An artist’s impression of the proposed Gabba Olympic stadium.

You would think that the protection of suburbs that Jones referenced and by inference, people’s property rights and quality of life would surely be a good thing but it seems they are an irritation when seen in the context of the Games and should be cast aside.

When you hear people talking about difficult decisions, bravery and those bothersome restrictive planning regulations that stop people who know what’s best for us having their way, you know that the bulldozers are coming in the name of the greater good.

No one has ever counted the number of sins that have been committed in the name of the greater good because there are just too many of them.

Those people who have the good fortune to live outside the urban sprawl are also hearing about those cursed restrictive planning regimes, the ones that stop companies building a wind farm outside their kitchen windows.

The Victorian government is considering changes to planning laws that will block appeals to the Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal, forcing objectors to take the matter to the Supreme Court which it knows will be prohibitively expensive.

In NSW renewable energy developers are pressuring the government to reduce the buffer zone between giant wind farms and nearby communities in the name of the holy grail of net zero.

Let’s have bravery by all means, the sort needed to stand up and say that when it comes to development for the Games or for anything else, people come first.