Steven Miles’s Brisbane Olympics misstep a mess of his own making

Steven Miles has failed to hear the message from the electorate on stadiums.

After the wake-up call Queensland Labor received on the ­weekend in two disastrous by-elections, you’d think Steven Miles would have got the message from voters: it’s the cost of living.

Instead, the Premier is mired in an Olympic gold-winning mess of his own making.

Just days after voters delivered double-digit swings against the government, and the loss of a seat in Labor heartland to the Liberal National Party opposition, the only thing seemingly on Miles’s agenda has been where to spend billions of dollars on stadiums for the 2032 Olympics.

The government’s taxpayer-funded polling, costing more than $400,000 and conducted in monthly focus groups since mid-last year, showed the biggest issue for voters is their struggle to make ends meet. More than four in five of Queenslanders, according to the polling, said they were ­unhappy with Labor’s response to inflationary pressures and crime, with every other issue a long way behind.

And, in a Newspoll for The Australian, conducted just before the by-elections and which indicated Labor’s likely defeat at the October general election, 50 per cent of Queenslanders ranked cost of living as their top vote-­deciding issue, with 25 per cent saying it was crime.

Miles, who powerbrokers backed in December to turnaround Labor’s woes, probably believed he looked decisive on Monday when he released, and immediately rejected, the main recommendations of a review into the government’s stadium plans for the Olympics. He had appointed former Brisbane Liberal mayor Graham Quirk to lead the $450,000 review of the plans, which Miles had championed through cabinet late last year.

Labor insiders privately lauded his genius in appointing a Liberal, making it hard for the LNP to bag the review and providing a possible wedge with his findings.

And when Quirk’s report recommended dumping the government’s three-year-old, $2.7bn plans to demolish and rebuild the Gabba and instead backed a proposal for a $3.4bn greenfield site Olympic stadium at Victoria Park, Miles thought he was on a winner.

He junked The Gabba plans and dismissed Victoria Park – which the anti-Olympics Greens would have used to target inner-city Labor MPs – framing his ­decision around cost-of-living pressures in that he could not “support building a brand new stadium when Queenslanders are doing it tough’’. Instead, Miles’s fix is to spend $1.6bn on the ­rundown Queensland Sport and Athletics Centre, built for the 1982 Commonwealth Games, with temporary stands and no specific answers to what everyone in Brisbane knows about the venue: it’s a nightmare to get to.

Many can’t believe the underused stadium people love to hate is going to be the Olympic showcase to the world. Others are ­disappointed it seems politics has robbed Brisbane of a new stadium rivalling the MCG and Perth’s Optus ­Stadium. All this in “Fortress Brisbane”, where Labor’s clear majority of seats has ensured its hold on power for decades.

Miles might have thought his moves would get the government’s three years of shambolic planning for the ­Olympics off the agenda. Instead, the debacle dominated parliament this week and is the talk of the town.