Gabba opponents prepare for round two in fight against rebuild
Opponents of the Gabba’s Olympic rebuild are preparing for another fight after the election of the Crisafulli government put the project firmly back on the table.
Former premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced a $1 billion rebuild in 2022, but the price tag ballooned to $2.7 billion. That led successor Steven Miles to scrap the project in favour of hosting track and field events at the Queensland Sport and Athletics Centre, about 10 kilometres south of the CBD.
What $2.7 billion would get you at the Gabba.Credit: Queensland Government
On the Sky News election night panel on Saturday, Palaszczuk said the Gabba made “perfect sense” as Brisbane’s Olympic stadium and QSAC would be “going backwards”.
In his first media conference as premier on Monday, David Crisafulli said he would have the board of his planned independent Olympic infrastructure delivery authority in place within a month.
That authority would then conduct his promised 100-day review, which would recommend the site of Brisbane’s contentious Olympic stadium.
“I’d like to think that the people we put around that table will deliver a plan that every single Queenslander will embrace, including me,” Crisafulli said.
The premier has repeatedly ruled out a new stadium, which appeared to rule out the Victoria Park proposal championed by the previous government’s independent Quirk review, and called the QSAC proposal “cringeworthy” last month.
“I think it’s pretty clear where we want to head with the 100-day plan on that independent infrastructure delivery authority,” Crisafulli said, when asked whether he had instructed public servants to halt QSAC planning.
“We were pretty upfront about that and we want to get cracking.”
That left the Gabba, which faced local opposition due to the planned closure of the adjacent East Brisbane State School, as the obvious remaining option within the Brisbane metropolitan area.
Federal Greens leader Adam Bandt, state MP for Maiwar, Michael Berkman, and federal MP for Griffith, Max Chandler-Mather, at a press conference in New Farm park.Credit: Matt Dennien
Local federal Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather said his party was ready to renew the fight if needed. His state colleague, Amy MacMahon, was a vocal critic of the Gabba plans, but appears set to lose her South Brisbane seat to Labor as counting continues.
“If the LNP think that they can come back into this community and decide to demolish a public school and a public park ... they should look back to what happened to the last premier that tried that,” Chandler-Mather said.
“Because if the LNP want to base their platform and remind people of the Newman years by coming out here and one of their first actions being announcing demolishing a public school, then they are going to have a massive campaign on their hands.
“My message to Crisafulli is: do not make the same mistake that the Palaszczuk Labor government did.”
East Brisbane State School P&C president Austin Gibbs said the school community was prepared to take up the fight again if required.
“We’ll just keep reminding people of those and saying ‘let’s not have the first image that goes around the world of bulldozers roll through kids playgrounds’ and saying ‘this is how Brisbane gets ready for the Olympics’,” he said.
“That’s a terrible look for us, so we want Mr Crisafulli to come to the community, engage with us, and we’ll work out a solution.”
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