He’s tasked with organising the 35th Summer Olympics.

Sure, he’ll have help from the State Government and thousands of experts and specialists and consultants and the entire staff of the Olympic Organising Committee.

But when Premier David Crisafulli unveils the plan for the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games venues at The Courier-Mail Future Brisbane Special Event at Howard Smith Wharves this Tuesday, Brisbane’s Lord Mayor will be one key figure in the Olympics planning process who will immediately start feeling the heat.

And there’s every chance that his next seven years will be a case of all guts, no glory.

Adrian will need the guts to wrangle disparate political factions and individual egos and self-interested business figures and point them all in one direction.

And there’s no guarantee he’ll reap the glory of being front and centre on July 23, 2032 when Brisbane’s Lord Mayor will play an official role at the opening ceremony.

Yet, here he is, carefully examining the menu in Deery’s Restaurant at the historic Story Bridge Hotel and appearing quite upbeat about perhaps the greatest challenge life will ever throw at him – a sprinter anxious to hear the crack of the starting pistol.

“This is it!’’ he declares with some relish.

“We do not have the luxury of another review. We simply don’t have the time.

“There is a point where all the frustrating politics has to stop and we need to roll our sleeves up, get some shovels into the ground and start working together.’’

The Story Bridge Hotel, which he chose as the lunch venue, is the perfect location to discuss his career along with perhaps the most important event Queensland will host this century.

Adrian just celebrated the 100th birthday of the Brisbane City Council which first gathered on March 18 1925,

Today, he’s sitting in a pub 40 years older than his council.

Richard Deery, pub proprietor with sister Jane and head of the Queensland Hotels Association who lived upstairs with his mum and dad when he was kid, materialises, acknowledging his old friend Adrian and providing personal insights into this grand old hotel, including an explanation as to why the southern approach of the Story Bridge has a somewhat dramatic bend in it.

“The workers refused to destroy the pub to make the road straight when they were building the bridge in the 1930s, ’’ he grins, gazing at old portraits dotting the numerous bars and anterooms and cubby holes which make up this famous pub known simply as the Kangaroo Point Hotel when James Darragh opened its doors in 1885.

“So we got a bend in the road to allow them to have a beer after work.’’

It’s a fascinating story, largely because it’s true, and reflects the sort of creative compromises Queenslanders can quickly accommodate to get a massive project done and dusted.

Yet the Story Bridge, mid-20th Century technological marvel as it may be, will be small beer compared to the planning and infrastructure required for the Olympics.

I don’t want to make him uncomfortable but can’t help marvelling, out loud and at length, at the enormous responsibility resting on Adrian’s still youthful 47-year-old shoulders, generously pointing out that, if he makes serious mistakes in the next few years, they’ll echo across the decades.

He remains unruffled. The challenge seems to enliven him, and he appears to be a glass half full kind of bloke anyway.

“There are a lot of cities facing decline, cities that are losing people,’’ he says.

“Even in the last few years since Covid Melbourne, one of the world’s best and liveable cities, has been losing people.

“We don’t have that problem.

“I would rather have the problem of growth rather than the problem of decline.

“”How I look at it is – ‘what are the things we need in southeast Queensland in the next three or four decades?

Well, an Olympic stadium for starters.

Adrian has a clear cut preference on that issue – Victoria Park.

It’s a parcel of inner-city land he transformed from a golf course to green space years ago.

In his view, if we go with Victoria Park, we’ll end up not so much with an Olympic stadium with lots of green space, as lots of green space with an Olympic stadium.

In many ways he’s a committed green. Not “Green’’ in the manner of his old sparring partner Jonathan Sriranganathan, a one-time Greens councillor and mayoral candidate whom he seems to have retained a reserved affection for, but green in the sense of making green space for people a primary plank in his approach to planning.

Since he became Lord Mayor in 2019 he not only began redefining Victoria Park but set about planting 40,000 trees and kicking off greening projects at the Archerfield wetlands while rehabilitating quarries at Mt Coot-tha and Mt Gravatt into green spaces.

It’s all been worthy public administration, but a far cry from blasting through the skies in an EA-18G Growler, which is what he dreamt of doing as a boy.

His dad was a German version of a Ten-Pound Pom, using assisted immigration to leave Dortmund in North Rhine-Westphalia in the early 1960s (still devastated by allied bombing during the war) when he was in his early 20s to take his chances in Australia, starting a cleaning operating on Brisbane’s south side which became the family business.

“It was only about 15 years after the war when he arrived and my dad had this gratitude towards this country – he could have easily been rejected by Australians because of the war when he arrived but he wasn’t, so right from a young age he instilled in me a sort of gratitude for this country.’’

“So I always had in my mind I wanted to serve my country, and being in the military was a way of giving back to the country.’’

He and his sister were the sole employees of mum and dad’s cleaning business, and his dad paid him good wages when he told him he was saving for a pilot’s licence, trying to instil in the boy the importance of thrift and the worth of saving for a specific goal.

He got his pilot’s licence before he got his driver’s licence, taking his mates up in a Piper Tomahawk in his last years of high school and, perhaps more importantly, returning them safely to earth.

There was nothing else in this universe he wanted more than to be a RAAF pilot, possibly of fighter jets, and the dream began to crystallise when he was accepted into the Airforce after school.

But, during a rigorous selection process the Airforce decided he was more suited to a job in Intelligence which left him devastated but, with no “Plan B,’’ he accepted the position.

“So you trained to be a spy?

“Well, that is what I might have ended up being I suppose,’’ he laughs.

Yet that decision led him to university in Canberra, paid for by the Defence Department, which led him to studying politics, which led him into doing a few field trips into the federal parliament, which led him to admire Paul Keating and John Howard whom he witnessed in full flight during Question Time.

After walking away from a future as an antipodean James Bond, those few hours watching the workings of the nation’s lower house helped nudge him towards a career in politics.

When elected councillor for Chandler ward in 2005 he became something of an apprentice under lord mayor Campbell Newman and later Graham Quirk – two men for whom he retains the deepest admiration.

Lunch almost finished, conversation meandering pleasantly, Olympics almost forgotten, he’s suddenly got a real clanger for me.

The cost of the Olympics is causing angst across this state. Pub talk often veers towards the Games and the consensus is often that we, as a state, cannot afford such an extravaganza.

Adrian tells me he recently asked his in-hour financial team to do an assessment of cost in relation to state and federal revenues.

What they came back with was stunning.

“It will only take two weeks of State Government revenue to pay for all of the venues that the State Government has to pay for,’’ he says.

“They (the state government) will receive the money in the door in two weeks to pay for the $3.6bn investments.

“As for the Federal Government – two days. They will be able to pay for the Olympics with just two days of income.

“So, just think about that.’’

The revenues generated by the Games could swiftly eclipse the cost, he says, pointing to Barcelona in Spain which, more than 30 years after hosting the Games, is still drawing on massive receipts from tourism.

Somewhere in the pit of his gut, I suggest, he has to be hoping that he becomes the Brisbane mayor to not only usher in the games, but have his name up in lights when the international camera crew assemble, and the Opening Ceremony begins.

Premier David Crisafulli probably has a better chance of surviving until 2032 to reap the political glory of the Games given the Premier only has to fight one election before July 2032.

“A lot of people don’t realise this but for me there are two (local government) elections before 2032,’’ Adrian says.

“It would be an amazing honour.

“But that decision is not for me.

“It’s a matter of whether the people want me to stay on.’’

Meal

Medium Grain Eye Fillet, Medium Grass Sirloin, Hand Cut Chips Broccolini, Kipfler Potatoes. 10/10.