Steve Price: Why Melbourne trumps Brisbane for hosting Olympics
Daniel Andrews should ditch the unloved Commonwealth Games and steal the Olympics from Brisbane — it would do Aussie taxpayers a huge favour.
Opinion
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Daniel Andrews should pick up the phone and call his great mate Anthony Albanese and offer to stage the 2032 Olympic Games in Melbourne.
It would mean ditching the unloved Commonwealth Games to be staged in Victoria in 2026 but who cares!
That second-rate regional competition designed to boost Labor’s vote in the bush has been unloved for decades and is a waste of money – we only got them because no other Commonwealth city wanted them.
Melbourne in 2032 would become one of only five global cities to host multiple modern Olympic Games following great places such as London, Paris, Athens, Tokyo and Los Angeles.
Melbourne would be perfect for 2032 and we should steal the Games off Brisbane much like our theft of the F1 Grand Prix from Adelaide.
We would be doing the taxpayers of Australia a massive favour and return this global sporting carnival to a city described by many as the premier sporting city of the world.
Queensland, or more accurately the residents of southeast Queensland, would scream their parochial heads off, but it makes financial and organisational sense.
Let’s look at the numbers.
Staging the 2032 Olympics in Brisbane was originally pitched to the Australian people as costing $5bn in infrastructure costs alone.
That was a criminal waste of Australian and Queensland taxpayers’ money anyway but guess what – that $5bn has magically become $7bn.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese — who spent all this week telling us how stretched the federal budget is and how much debt we as a nation are in — flew to Queensland last Friday to sign a funding deal with Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk.
No consultation with the Australian people, no second thoughts, just a bucket-load of money to be splashed across 16 new and upgraded venues mainly in Brisbane.
To be fair the previous government under Scott Morrison was just as dumb – if not more irresponsible – given the Melbourne solution was staring them in the face.
And what exactly will this $7bn split 50-50 between Canberra and the Queensland government pay for? The big-ticket item is such a waste of money to be laughable.
To stage the opening and closing ceremonies and the athletics Brisbane organisers intend to bulldoze a perfectly functioning Gabba stadium and rebuild it at an eye watering cost of $2.7bn. The original plan in 2021 was $1bn and you suspect these people just pluck figures out of thin air.
Talk to anyone in construction and they would laugh in your face at the notion that a predicted build cost in 2023 will stay at that cost for the next nine years.
Worse the stadium sitting there today – and many of us have been to AFL or cricket at the Gabba – seats 42,000 people. The $2.7bn will add just 8000 more seats.
That’s madness and when you compare this $2.7bn minimum spend to what it cost to construct Perth’s magnificent Optus stadium at $1.8bn that included public transport links and you just shake your head.
Sydney’s new Allianz Stadium at Moore Park holding just 7000 fewer spectators was thrown up for just $828m.
It gets worse we will also be funding a new build for something called the Brisbane Arena in the CBD paid for by Australian taxpayers at a cost of $2.5bn.
This joint will have a swimming pool temporarily installed inside its 17,000- spectator capacity for the swimming events.
After the Games the pool at a massive cost will be removed and the arena used for live events. This will also blow out in costs and the swimming according to the IOC themselves could have been held at the existing Gold Coast Commonwealth Games aquatic centre.
Indeed, the IOC back in 2021 was happy to use the existing Gabba for the opening and closing ceremonies and Carrara stadium on the Gold Coast for athletics.
Seriously though $7bn from federal and state budgets – that will surely blow out again – at a time when we are told national debt is crippling the economy and we can’t afford to fund basic health care and public housing.
I’m all for Australia selling itself to the world but if these people chucking this money around for an Olympic Games were serious, they would have put Melbourne up as the preferred contender.
Victoria would not need to build or spend one dollar on new venues. The 100,000 seat MCG for opening and closing and all the athletics, the adjoining Melbourne Tennis Centre for everything from tennis to gymnastics, basketball and track cycling.
Swimming and water polo and diving at MSAC, boxing, weightlifting and wrestling at Marvel and even surfing at the UrbnSurf in Tullamarine.
I could go on through all 32 sports that Melbourne could accommodate with little or no cost aside from renovations between now and 2032.
The PM justifying his decision to spend $3.5bn of your tax dollars spruiked Brisbane as becoming a global city and global powerhouse as the reason.
Not really, it will still just be Brisbane.
The IOC has gone back to London three times and Paris will notch up three Olympics next year while LA will hold its third Olympics in 2028.
It’s time to come back to Melbourne a second time and save all that money.
Originally published as Steve Price: Why Melbourne trumps Brisbane for hosting Olympics
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