2032 Brisbane Games: Athletes’ village is now a task of Olympian difficulty

Veteran developer Don O’Rorke has declared Brisbane’s Olympic village can be built in four years after revelations the lion’s share of funding to house 10,000 athletes in 2032 was yet to be budgeted.

Artist’s impression of Hamilton North Shore, home of the athlete’s village during the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Developer Don O’Rorke says Brisbane’s Olympic village can be built in four years, despite revelations that the lion’s share of funding to house 10,000 athletes in 2032 is yet to be budgeted.

The former Labor government had allocated $155m for early works at Northshore Hamilton, including a “street renewal program” to build new roads, a subtropical boulevard and a cycle paths.

Construction of the accommodation buildings was due to start in 2027 and be converted to social housing after the Games.

Other accommodation was slated to be built at the Sunshine Coast, Gold Coast and Kooralbyn, with all village projects now expected to cost $3.5bn, Liberal National Party Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie revealed.

“Labor must come clean with Queenslanders and explain whether they either forgot that more than 22,000 athletes needed accommodation or if they deliberately misled Queenslanders before the election,” he said.

The total infrastructure bill for the Olympics was set at $7bn in 2023 under a funding deal between the state and federal governments but former Labor treasurer Cameron Dick on Wednesday insisted the package was only ever meant to cover Games venues.

“The funding agreement relates to the venues, and that’s the agreement that was struck with the federal government,” he said.

Mr O’Rorke, the founder of Consolidated Properties, said the $7bn envelope was now “unachievable” because of significant increases in construction costs. “The Olympics will be the priority for the industry but these issues need to be addressed,” he said.

“There is enough capacity in the system but it will be at the cost of other things.”

Mr O’Rorke said the government should consider partnerships with private businesses to deliver athletes’ housing, which was done for the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast in 2018.

Mr Dick, now Deputy Opposition Leader, defended the previous government’s failure to budget for an athletes’ village, saying it had planned to work with the private sector.

“We obviously wanted to work with commercial proponents to deliver those projects like the village for the Commonwealth Games in 2018,” he said.

He questioned the LNP’s $3.5bn figure “when there hasn’t been any planning work, when there hasn’t been any site determination yet for those villages, when there hasn’t been any costings done, when there’s been no business cases or no project validation reports”.