Presidents’ man keen to get Games on track after a tardy start

Nearly nine months since Brisbane got the nod to host the Games, the no-shows were beginning to stack up. But new boss and corporate titan Andrew Liveris insists politics won’t thwart the event.

Andrew Liveris, the Darwin born exec and former CEO of Dow Chemicals in the US. Picture: Ryan Osland

Not before time, things have started to move on the organisational side of the 2032 Olympics in Brisbane. It’s been nearly nine months since the Queensland capital got the nod to host a new-look Games and the no-shows were beginning to stack up.

No board of directors, no CEO, not even an office.

Small wonder the appointment this week of international corporate titan Andrew Liveris as president of the organising committee was fulsomely welcomed when Scott Morrison, in one of his last acts before sending the government into caretaker mode for the election, issued a joint statement with Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Liberal National Party Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner trumpeting the news.

Recruiting Liveris was quite the coup. Darwin-born and Brisbane-schooled, the 67-year-old climbed the ranks of US multinational Dow Chemical to head a $47bn company that operates in 160 countries. He has advised four American presidents on business and investment policy.

Speaking during a flying visit to Brisbane, Liveris tells Inquirer: “This role, its impact for the country, the state, the city, means a lot to me personally. I have actually spent quite a lot of my life thinking about giving back.”

His work is certainly cut out for him. The Games might be a decade away, but that doesn’t mean there is time to burn – especially when the traditional no-expense-spared template has been pared back to ostensibly deliver long-lasting benefits without breaking the bank under the International Olympic Committee’s “New Norm” agenda. This puts a premium on savvy organisation and innovation.

Anthony Albanese watches Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk during the official opening of a Woolworths distribution centre. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dan Peled

Yet after the initial flurry of excitement in July when Brisbane became the third Australian city to secure the summer Olympics – cutting the 44-year gap between Melbourne 1956 and Sydney 2000 to a single generation – the waiting game took over.

True, progress was made in terms of framing and enacting state legislation to establish the Organising Committee for the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games. But how long could it take to find 21 directors for the OCOG board and someone to lead them? Until that was done the new delivery agency could not be staffed.

A selling point of Brisbane’s bid to the IOC was outsourcing events to regional sites dotted across the Gold and Sunshine coasts and west to range-top Toowoomba. That will involve costly and time-consuming upgrades to rail and road infrastructure, not to mention construction of international-grade venues and facilities to accommodate athletes, officials, media and spectators.

Where was the urgency?

Liveris answers carefully: “I’ve arrived on the scene just now. My assessment of what came before … it’s not fair one way or another to make comment on it.”

But hiring a CEO and executive team was a priority and will be on the agenda at the inaugural OCOG board meeting on April 27. “We will get up these things pretty quick so that the first nine months will not be seen as anything other than … to get the setup right,” he insists.

Pressed on concern that it’s taken too long to get the board in place, he says: “I really have no specificity why it took how long it did. All I can tell you is the recruitment process to get me on board was a couple of months from first contact until now. I felt that was done very professionally and very well.”

In any event, he argues, what’s been done to date puts Brisbane four years ahead of comparative Olympics: “Most other Games are in our delivery position six years out, not 10.”

The size of the board, almost twice that of SOCOG for the Sydney Games, reflects the complexity of the Brisbane project. While the 2000 Olympics were essentially a NSW government enterprise, Liveris’s job is akin to herding cats given the number of stakeholders in the 2032 event.

The IOC and Australian Olympic Committee are there, of course, but this time the tab is being picked up 50-50 by the Queensland and federal governments, which gives them both seats at the table. Brisbane City Council – more a city-state of 1.2 million people with an annual budget $3bn – is also involved, along with the southeast Queensland Council of Mayors. Tensions soon emerged on personality and political lines.

Only days out from the deadline to finalise the IOC bid, Palaszczuk put Morrison over a barrel by demanding he fund, sight unseen, half the estimated $1bn cost of redeveloping the Gabba sports ground to host the Olympic ceremonies and athletics competition.

Had the PM baulked – as he was urged to do by some in the government, infuriated by Palaszczuk’s brazenness – the bid could have fallen over there and then. Morrison went on to make it clear there would be no blank cheque: the federal buy-in for half the projected $5bn running cost of the Games plus $6bn-plus for infrastructure came with an unprecedented say for Canberra on how and where the money was to be spent.

That translated into four dedicated board seats for Morrison’s nominees, four for Palaszczuk, two for Brisbane City Council as well as the five independent directors including Liveris who had to be signed off by both leaders. Again, the process was far from seamless. Morrison’s Olympics envoy, Queensland LNP MP Ted O’Brien, found himself out on a limb for suggesting the federal government should pull out of the partnership because Queensland was trying to stack OCOG; amid reports he had been carpeted by the Liberal leadership in Canberra, O’Brien dropped the claim.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk with John Coates speak after she succesfully bid to hold the 2032 Olympics in Brisbane. Picture: Adam Head

But the niggle continued with criticism that Palaszczuk had dragged her feet on naming her picks for the board until January. For reasons unknown, the appointment of the independent directors and Liveris went down to the wire of the election being called by Morrison last Sunday. Any delay would have pushed the announcement into caretaker limbo with no guarantee Anthony Albanese would back the selections were he to prevail on May 21. A puzzling risk, to say the least.

Liveris professes to be unfazed. “I have a goal and the goal is as a city, as a state, as a country to put on an amazing Olympics in 2032,” he says. “I’ve got 10 years to plan it and the politics will be what the politics will be.”

As a business leader, he is versed in “aligning people to a common cause”, and the board’s “beauty” was to have the “constituent parts of all the stakeholders”. An upbeat Liveris says: “I am actually pretty excited about getting everyone on the same page. You know, it’s going to be hard work. Will there be a few steps forward and one step back from time to time? Yep, you betcha. But you don’t get discouraged by it.”

Having retired as chairman and CEO of Dow Chemical Company in 2018, he remains busy, shuttling with wife Paula between homes in the US and Sydney. He recently completed a six-month stint as co-chair of Joe Biden’s Build Together Coalition to promote the President’s $US1.2 trillion infrastructure package.

But the Games will have first call on his time and, if need be, he will cut back on commitments that range from directorships at IBM and oil giant Saudi Aramco to chairing the boards of electric carmaker Lucid Motors and multibillion-dollar asset management concern Blackrock Long Term Private Capital.

He’s too worldly to buy into speculation that outgoing AFL boss Gillon McLachlan has been lined up for the CEO role at OCOG – “You’re experienced enough … to know I can’t comment on who’s in and who’s out,” he explains – but says the first three months will be devoted to “massive listening mode” as he meets key players and stakeholders to map out those crucial next moves.

The businessman in Liveris is already thinking about sponsorships and deals with the private sector, just like Dow did when it became a sustainability partner for the 2012 London Olympics. That would be one way to achieve the stated aim of making Brisbane a cost-neutral games, he says.

Another goal, to deliver a meaningful legacy from the Games, goes beyond the obvious benefit of spending up on public transport and new infrastructure. Liveris points to the supply-chain disruption that vexed nations and corporations during the pandemic. This could work in favour of local businesses leading into Brisbane 2032, he predicts. “It means you’ve got to do as much as you can as a country to on-source and secure supply chains.”

But it would be a mistake to see this extraordinary Australian as a one-dimensional figure. A gifted public speaker, he tells the story of how he is always being asked about his political allegiances. How could you serve Barack Obama, then Donald Trump? (Famously, he quit as head of Trump’s Manufacturing Council in 2017 over the then president’s defence of white nationalists involved in deadly street violence in the US city of Charlottesville.)

Liveris explains that he also worked with George W. Bush and now Biden too. No big deal, he says. “If you study me … I have exercised fellowship in leadership. In other words, I follow the people whose opinion I respected. Those inputs are diverse, they come from everywhere.”

Just the ticket for a successful Olympics.