2032 Brisbane Olympics: ‘Keep stadium authority jobs on hold until election’
Brisbane Olympics boss Andrew Liveris has demanded Steven Miles’s Labor government delay appointments to the independent agency tasked with managing the multibillion-dollar Games infrastructure program until after the October election.
Brisbane Olympics boss Andrew Liveris has demanded Steven Miles’s Labor government delay appointments to the independent agency tasked with managing the multibillion-dollar Games infrastructure program until after the October election.
Legislation to establish the Games Venue and Legacy Delivery Authority, charged with delivering key infrastructure for the 2032 Games, was passed in May but there have been no independent directors appointed to its board after four months.
In response to questions from The Australian on Thursday about why the appointment of seven directors had been delayed, State Development Minister Grace Grace revealed Mr Liveris and Brisbane’s Liberal National Party Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner had written her a joint letter earlier this month.
“Brisbane 2032 Organising Committee Chair Andrew Liveris and Lord Mayor Schrinner have written to me requesting that no appointments are made to the GVLDA Board before the state election,” Ms Grace said.
“The government has agreed to this request and we will progress this soon after the election.
“GVLDA continues to deliver its functions under interim CEO Emma Thomas.”
The state government appointed former Sunshine Coast council chief executive Emma Thomas as the authority’s interim boss in July.
Seven independent board directors will be appointed to the authority after the election and chosen by a selection panel made up of the chief executives of the “Games delivery partners,” including state and federal governments, relevant local councils, the Australian Olympic Committee and Paralympics Australia.
An oversight committee was a key part of Brisbane’s pitch to the International Olympic Committee for the Games, but was scrapped by then-Olympics Infrastructure Minister Steven Miles in March last year.
When he brought the co-ordination office in-house, giving the state government total control over the doomed Gabba rebuild, Mr Miles said an independent agency was “a new bureaucracy that would just soak up resources” and was not useful or necessary.
But in one of his first acts after replacing Annastacia Palaszczuk as Premier in December, he vowed to reinstate the stand-alone authority first proposed when Brisbane secured the event in 2021.
Late last year, Mr Schrinner accused the state government of having “completely lost its way on the road to the Games” over a miscommunicated decision about a stadium at the RNA showgrounds. He quit the Intergovernmental Leaders’ Forum over the spat. He walked back his decision in May after Mr Miles promised to introduce the independent infrastructure delivery authority.
Mr Liveris this week praised Mr Schrinner’s Brisbane Metro transport plan and said it would be “seminal” to move athletes and move fans at the Brisbane Games in 2032.
The Brisbane 2032 organising committee is holding a board meeting in Cairns on Friday.
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