Game has changed for managing Olympics, says Scott Morrison

Scott Morrison has revealed the federal government had ‘an express understanding’ that an independent agency would oversee infrastructure for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk.

Scott Morrison has revealed the federal government had “an express understanding” that an independent agency would oversee the multibillion-dollar infrastructure program for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics before the governance model was shelved by Labor.

The former prime minister told The Australian he had never committed to rebuild the Gabba stadium at a cost that has since exploded to $2.7bn – intensifying alarm at the spend on Games venues signed off by Anthony Albanese and Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk last month.

Mr Morrison said establishing an Olympic Co-ordination Authority was held to be “critical” to the good governance of projects to ready Brisbane and southeast Queensland for the planet’s biggest sporting event.

Despite featuring in Brisbane’s bid to the International Olympic Committee to win the hosting rights in 2021, the OCA is yet to emerge alongside the Games’ organising committee, OCOG, headed by corporate high-flyer Andrew Liveris.

The OCA, or a body like it, was to have been the “mechanism” for Canberra and Ms Palaszczuk’s state Labor government to share control of the infrastructure program, Mr Morrison said on Wednesday. “We weren’t going to be an ATM for the Olympics. We were going to be a partner. We wanted to be 50-50 not just in funding, but in sharing the job and making those decisions,” he said.

“Our government was not just going to hand over money to the state government to do however they liked with decisions on these things that we were joint-funded.

“And the suggestion was to do that by establishing such an authority. Now, whether they established some other mechanism that did the same thing … that would have been fine. But the OCA was certainly the mechanism that we had envisaged.”

Moreton Bay Indoor Sport Centre design as part of the Brisbane 2032 Olympic Games.

In their pitch to the IOC, the Brisbane bid proponents — headed by Ms Palaszczuk and backed by Mr Morrison as PM — pledged that the timing of the infrastructure agency’s establishment would “coincide” with that of OCOG in April 2022. But Infrastructure Minister Catherine King has distanced the federal government from the model, with her office saying last week it had not been party to the bid nor Olympic host contract, and any questions on the OCA should be directed to the Queensland government.

At the same time, a spokesman for Ms Palaszczuk would say only that the Games partners had “agreed in principle to the establishment of a co-ordinating agency.”

Mr Morrison spoke out after the man he had named as envoy to the Olympics, Queensland MP and former OCOG director Ted O’Brien, launched an attack in parliament on the collapse of the shared governance approach and 170 per cent blowout in the cost of the Gabba redevelopment, from an indicative $1bn in 2021 to $2.7bn. “We have a series of agreements, to which I was personally a part, all of which have been changed, breached,” the opposition frontbencher said. “I give a warning to all governments: don’t breach the faith with the Australian people on this one.”

Ted O’Brien says the original motivation for the Games was for better public transport for the region’s booming population and not ‘flashy facilities’.

Under the reworked Olympic funding deal unveiled by Mr Albanese and Ms Palaszczuk on February 17, the Gabba will become a solely state project while the federal government takes charge of the technically challenging $2.5bn development of the 17,000-seat Brisbane Arena above a railway yard in central Brisbane. The Olympic swimming will be held there in a drop-in pool.

Mr Morrison insisted that he had agreed to do no more than discuss the Gabba upgrade with Ms Palaszczuk, who proposed that the 42,000 capacity cricket and AFL stadium be demolished to make way for a new structure seating 50,000 to host athletics and the opening and closing ceremonies.

“We hadn’t agreed to do it at $1bn,” he said. “What we would have done is work the partnership to make sure we had an appropriate venue that met the commitments to the IOC and that was responsible from the taxpayers’ point of view.”

But a Queensland government spokesman said on Wednesday the Gabba had always been part of the Games masterplan and Mr Morrison and former sports minister Richard Colbeck had “cheered its inclusion”.

Neither the Prime Minister’s office nor that of Ms King responded to questions on Wednesday from The Australian.