Roll out the corrugated iron, dust off Matilda, the biggest kangaroo in the whole, wide world (last seen at a truck stop in Gympie), for the greatest show on Earth is coming to town. The Miles government has taken a long, hard look at the black hole of Olympic Games budgeting and decided not to decide. Except to say a rebuilt Gabba now will not be Australia’s third-largest city’s world-class stadium. Instead, the old stadium will remain with a cheap-ish renovation. Flip or flop, Premier Miles?
Steven Miles and his apparatchiks will claim they are in the business of curbing spending on the event. Federal money has been pledged but capped so any cost overruns will fall on the heads and the pockets of Queensland taxpayers. Hosting an Olympics on the cheap may sound virtuous but the only reason any city would be mad enough to host the Games is to create infrastructure, public transport facilities and urban redevelopment that revitalise its metropolitan area. Otherwise it becomes the palest of albino elephants and the city in question languishes in debt with no enduring benefit.
On my occasional trips across the Tweed, locals bursting with pride often ask what I think of Brisvegas and I feel obliged to reply that I’m sure it will be nice when it’s finished. It is a city that sprawls to its west, north and south. Highways in all directions are choked with traffic. Railways linking the capital with other major population centres on the Gold and Sunshine coasts remain available only by architectural modellers.
Within days of becoming Premier, Miles called for an independent review headed by former Brisbane lord mayor Graham Quirk but didn’t like its independent tone. Miles has scratched the $2.7bn demolition and reconstruction of the Gabba, where the Games would host the opening and closing ceremonies.
This means that this year’s Olympic Games in Paris will begin and end at the Stade de France (capacity 80,000), in 2028 the Los Angeles Coliseum will host the LA Games opening and closing ceremonies (current capacity 77,500 although this will increase), while in 2032 the world’s best athletes will compete at the Queensland Sport and Athletics Centre, which in its halcyon days of the Commonwealth Games in 1982 seated 48,500 people but would barely fit a quarter of that now and is located a good 20-minute drive from the athletes village.
The Quirk review decided the Gabba might not be the apple of everyone’s eye – the cost of tearing down Brisbane’s major sporting stadium and building it anew is now at $3bn. Rather, the review recommended a 55,000-seat stadium be constructed in Victoria Park at a cost of $3.4bn.
Miles pooh-poohed that idea and has come up with a $2.7bn plan to revamp the Athletics Centre, spending a few bob hosing the blood off the walls at Lang Park with a bit leftover to bring the Gabba up to scratch for the 21st century. For example, height restrictions at the Gabba mean an ambulance cannot proceed on to the playing arena. In other words, a lick of paint here, a lick of paint there. But ultimately no world-class stadium or sporting and entertainment precincts with post-Olympics arenas scattered around the suburbs, providing further traffic nightmares and placing pressure on antiquated public transport facilities.
We are still not sure where the Olympic torch will be placed or which of the renovated stadiums will host the opening and closing ceremonies.
Disaster looms. Host cities in the recent past have battled with debt burdens. Athens and Atlanta still struggle but there is nowhere worse than Montreal, the Canadian city that hosted the Olympic Games in 1976 at a cost of $10bn in today’s money. The debt was finally paid off 30 years later.
French architect Roger Taillibert, who designed the stadium and Olympic precincts, was sacked a year before the Games got under way. His parting remarks stand as prescient for Queenslanders today. “The construction of the Olympic Park and stadium showed me a level of organised corruption, theft, mediocrity, sabotage and indifference that I had never witnessed before and have never witnessed since. The system failed completely and every civil engineering firm involved knew they could just open this veritable cash register and serve themselves,” Taillibert said.
The roofed stadium that became known as “the Big O” cannot be used if the snow load exceeds 3cm, in a city that records monthly snowfalls of 50cm in winter. Chunks of concrete from the stadium routinely fall to earth, once during a Major League Baseball game. The stadium stands friendless and unloved today with an estimated $1.5bn price tag for it to be torn down and sent to landfill.
Athletes tiptoed through construction sites to enter the Big O for the Parade of Nations. A fortnight later Montrealers awoke to a post-Olympic hangover so palpable it could be rendered in oil and with a deep sense of astonishingly expensive regret.
The great cheapening of the 2032 Olympic Games may lead to a seismic cultural cringe. Rumours abound that the Miles government, with its eye on a state election later this year and clearly on the nose with the punters, has entertained the prospect of giving up on hosting the Olympic Games altogether. The cost of that backflip would be an eye-watering $500m and change for nothing in return but red-faced humiliation.
As it stands, Miles promises to deliver the Olympic Games to Brisbane with no thought for those who live in the city itself.
Will it be a future crushing catastrophe of Montreal proportions or a mere run-of-the-mill Athens-like disaster when the Olympic flame is extinguished?
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