The cloud over the $3.2bn – and counting – Sunshine Coast heavy rail project marks a turning point for the Brisbane-based Olympics.
It draws into question the fundamental rationale for hosting the planet’s biggest combined-sports tournament: that the multibillion-dollar cost of the 2032 Games would be offset by lasting benefits including generational infrastructure development such a fast-growing region.
Australia’s third Olympics after Melbourne 1956 and Sydney 2000 are too big an opportunity to squander. They have rightly generated public enthusiasm and government backing at the local, state and federal levels on the basis of being a game-changer for Queensland’s thickly populated and investment-hungry southeast corner.
Yet bit by bit, the goalposts are being moved. What started as a football-sized field of dreams has been downsized into something far less enticing. Try a basketball court for one of the Olympic sports that’s to be farmed out to the Sunshine Coast.
And like frogs in a pot, we’re not supposed to notice until it’s too late.
When the Games were awarded in July 2021, the talk was of a “three airport” strategy to open up the congested SEQ region with heavy rail, linking Brisbane to the outlying gateways of Maroochydore in the north and Coolangatta on the NSW border.
It is now abundantly clear that’s all it was: talk.
The Sunshine Coast leg was supposed to enable fast trains to run to the booming beach enclave, leveraging the increased line capacity created by the $6.3bn Crossriver Rail metro system beneath Brisbane’s CBD, due to open in 2025.
The heavy rail line south to Robina, connecting with the existing Gold Coast light rail, would be pushed through to Coolangatta Airport under a proposal that is yet to progress past the review stage. The best that will likely happen is an extension of the tram line now ending at Broadwater, 18km short of the airport.
The future of the Sunshine Coast Rail upgrade is dependent on a business case that won’t be released until the new year. The only certainty is that the original $3.2bn costing will have blown out, sowing further doubt about whether the federal government will stick to a 50-50 funding deal with Queensland.
Deputy Premier Steven Miles – who was left to front the media on Thursday even though his boss, Annastacia Palaszczuk, is Minister for the Olympics and a vice-president of the Brisbane2032 organising committee – said the state would be stretched to cover the full cost of the Sunshine Coast Rail extension, as it did on Crossriver Rail when Canberra refused to come to the party.
No wonder Sunshine Coast mayor Mark Jamieson complained on Thursday of being sold a “dud” if the rail project was axed.
Local federal MP Ted O’Brien, the former Coalition government’s Olympics envoy under Scott Morrison, said athletes and spectators would struggle to get to venues on time, an “international embarrassment” for Australia.
The danger is that public goodwill for the Games – essential to their success – will give way to sullen suspicion that taxpayers are on the hook for a much bigger bill than has been advertised to date, without the promised benefits.
With a tight state election looming next October, it’s not hard to envisage how populists such as Pauline Hanson or Clive Palmer might work the time-honoured antipathy between city and country in Queensland at the expense of “Brisbane’s” Olympics.
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