East Brisbane campaigners see finish line in battle against the Gabba rebuild

The champagne corks are not quite popping around the Gabba, but the local community members who have campaigned against the $2.7 billion rebuild for almost three years are upbeat after the Australian Olympic Committee effectively killed off the idea.

The AOC’s intervention has given the adjacent East Brisbane State School a possible reprieve from oblivion, as the rebuilt stadium’s footprint was set to squeeze the school out of its site.

The red-brick, heritage-listed buildings at East Brisbane State School. The Gabba looms large over the school.Credit: Tony Moore

As it stood, Education Queensland planned to move the school to a site next to Coorparoo Secondary College. A spokesman for Education Minister Di Farmer said it was too early to comment on the ramifications of a Gabba policy reversal, given it had not been confirmed.

Ultimately, that would be determined by former Brisbane LNP lord mayor Graham Quirk, who is conducting a 60-day review into Olympic venues on the Labor state government’s behalf.

But Rethink the Gabba Inc co-chair Dan Angus said, after nearly three years of campaigning to save the school, he saw light at the end of the tunnel.

“It’d be crazy for them now to not come back and go ‘right, we’re not going to do the Gabba in the way we proposed’,” he said.

AOC president Ian Chesterman said on Thursday there were “more creative solutions than rebuilding the Gabba” for the 2032 Olympic Games, following on from Olympic heavyweight John Coates’ comments to News Corp the previous day that the project should be abandoned.

Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner – a member of the Brisbane 2032 organising committee board – went as far as to call the project “dead, buried and cremated”.

Greens MP Amy MacMahon, whose South Brisbane electorate took in the Gabba, said Premier Steven Miles did not need to wait for Quirk’s review to be concluded to call time on the project.

“Labor has to come clean with what their plans are for the Gabba before the council election next month, or they should expect a wipeout for them to the Greens,” she said.

“We’re not stopping until we hear the premier say that the Gabba rebuild is scrapped, and East Brisbane State School and Raymond Park are protected.”

Angus said Coates and the AOC had created an “off-ramp” for the government and it needed to take it.

“As soon as they got rid of [former premier] Annastacia [Palaszczuk], they decided – probably before that moment – that the project is toxic and they should never have done it,” he said.

“We may never know the full story, but I do wonder about the circumstances why this was even a thing, because it seems, as far as we were concerned, as a community, it came out of nowhere.”

Palaszczuk’s unilateral April 2021 announcement not only blindsided the community, but other stakeholders involved in the 2032 Games bid, including the federal and local governments.

Comment was sought from the East Brisbane State School P&C.

Angus said, should the project be scrapped, the money earmarked for the school’s relocation should instead be poured into improving the 19th-century, heritage-listed school.

“There needs to be some real effort on the government’s part to come back and actually compensate for that [three years of uncertainty],” he said.

“So take the money that would have been spent on building this unwanted school [at Coorparoo], because you’ve already got Coorparoo State School located 500 metres up the road, which is a beautiful school, and we already have East Brisbane State School in place, which people love.

“Take the money and spend it on improving those schools.”