The penny finally dropped: there are no easy options when it comes to building venues for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics, just a choice between what’s expedient in a state election year and what should be done for the lasting benefit of the nation’s third-largest city.
No prize for guessing where Premier Steven Miles landed on Monday.
He went against the independent advice he had commissioned from former mayor Graham Quirk and moved a showpiece of the Games, the athletics, to a stopgap stadium erected four decades ago deep in the city’s southern suburbs.
The Queensland Sport and Athletics Centre site is notoriously underserved by public transport and will cost $1.6bn on Quirk’s numbers to be brought up to scratch – half the price of an unpopular scheme to redevelop the ageing Gabba, but hardly small change, either.
The post-Olympics legacy? Don’t you worry about that, because there would be none to speak of. As Quirk concluded, witheringly: “The panel’s view is that the investment of up to $1.6bn in QSAC does not demonstrate value for money and is very hard to justify.
“When accessibility challenges are then considered alongside a variety of other compromises needed to stage the track and field events, the QSAC option becomes less attractive – and with minimal additional benefits to the current facility for a lasting legacy when compared to the demand and use currently.”
This is a mistake. A very bad one. The best that can be said of the old QEII stadium is that it did a cracking job as a 1982 Commonwealth Games venue but was already well past its use-by date when the Brisbane Broncos stopped playing there 20 years ago. The club’s crowds plunged by three quarters because of the access issues.
Quirk gave Miles half of what he wanted as Labor anxiously eyes its date with the voters in October: a way out of the $3bn-plus outlay on the Gabba and an alternative to an even more eye-watering $4bn spend on Brisbane Arena, the other key Olympics venue.
Sensibly, the 17,000-seat hall earmarked for the swimming in 2032 will be moved about 500m from the money pit of its proposed site at Roma Street railway station to a greenfield spot in the adjoining parklands, saving up to $1.5bn.
Quirk’s idea for a new $3.4bn stadium to replace the Gabba at Victoria Park, sandwiched between the CBD’s northern fringe and the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital campus, was always going to be a tough sell in the teeth of a cost-of-living crisis – let alone to a government that is carrying the baggage of Miles’ down-in-the-polls outfit.
But it was better than what the Olympic city will get from a pale coat of paint being slapped on the white elephant of QEII stadium.
That’s not a legacy, it is a disgrace.
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