SHOULD BRISBANE JUST PULL OUT OF HOSTING THE OLYMPICS ALTOGETHER?
Ok so here’s a key problem the government is facing regarding Olympic venues…
The Gabba proposal is ridiculously expensive and has heaps of negative flow-on impacts, particularly the loss of East Brisbane State School and the impacts to Raymond Park, but also inflationary pressure on local property values (which in practice is actually slowing down development), inevitable traffic disruption, and noise and air pollution from construction in a very dense urban neighbourhood.
But in finding an alternative site for the main stadium, the government needs:
- room for a warm-up athletics track very close to the main stadium
- mass public transport options that can move tens of thousands of people in and out of the stadium precinct every couple of hours
- proximity to the athlete village site
Even if you can find a venue that ticks those first two boxes, the International Olympic Committee requires that travel time for athletes between their accommodation and their competition venue should be 20 minutes or less. So the current plan to put the athletes village at Hamilton and have athletes travelling to the Gabba is actually already a stretch.
You can partially address this challenge by not holding the opening and closing ceremonies in the stadium itself (e.g. Paris is holding its opening ceremony along the Seine River), but even if ALL the athletes don’t have to go to the stadium for the ceremonies, there are still thousands who would need to commute there for their events.
If the government is looking for an alternative stadium location to the Gabba, and they want to comply with that requirement of proximity to athlete accommodation, they’re basically constrained to inner-city Brisbane or the middle-ring northern suburbs OR they have to find a different location for the athletes village. The main athlete village has to accommodate somewhere between 10 000 and 15 000 athletes – finding a single site for that many new dwellings anywhere within Brisbane’s urban footprint is a real stretch.
A lot of people (including Greens MPs) have floated the QSAC site at Nathan as a potential main athletics stadium. It already has a warm-up track right next to it, and there’s a good tourism story to tell about Toohey Forest, which now has a growing population of koalas whereas thirty years ago there were NO koalas left there.
If it’s a choice between spending $3 billion demolishing and replacing the existing Gabba Stadium, or spending that money to build a dedicated mass transit option (e.g. an underground train line) to get to QSAC and the Griffith Nathan campus, I would lean towards the latter – at least then we get some permanent public transport upgrades that wouldn’t otherwise happen. But the distance from the athlete village remains an unresolved issue.
If, on the other hand, you’re going to spend all the resources and money to build a NEW athletic stadium (which is effectively what the Gabba proposal involves), you might as well put it closer to where the athlete village is being built. There are several large sites around Albion/Eagle Farm/Hamilton where you could fit a stadium and warm-up track without shutting down any schools or demolishing any residential homes.
Anyway, my personal opinion (even before the Gabba was first proposed) has been that despite some obvious benefits, hosting the Olympics is a net loss for Brissie, and that we should consider pulling out of hosting as long as the costs of backing out aren’t too high. I don’t feel too strongly about this, but I think the option should still be on the table at least for a little longer.
In the past, Olympic host cities were only locked in 7 or 8 years ahead of time, so there’s still time for the IOC to find a new host for 2032. If we wait much longer though, the costs and collateral damage of pulling out would rise dramatically.
But these are pretty significant questions for the future of our city, so I’m interested in what everyone else reckons.
I’ve chucked up a short survey at the link in the comments. It’s not asking for any contact details/private info, and the demographic questions are optional. So far it has mostly only been promoted to Greens supporters, but I want to know what everyone thinks, regardless of political affiliation.
