Brisbane's abandoned 2032 Olympic Games

Sydney Morning Herald

20-06-2025

Queensland Sport and Athletics Centre
Crisafulli was not the only premier to ignore the advice of a review he commissioned.
Then-premier Steven Miles was widely criticised last year when he rejected the Quirk review's recommendation to build an Olympic stadium at Victoria Park and chose instead to host the Games' marquee events at the Queensland Sport and Athletics Centre, formerly QEII Stadium.
QSAC, which hosted the 1982 Commonwealth Games, would have been demolished to make way for a permanent, 14,000-seat athletics facility.
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During the Olympics, temporary seating would have increased the capacity to 40,000 – the smallest Olympic stadium since Amsterdam 1928.
All up, the project would have cost $1.6 billion – and that was before public transport improvements, which Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner said would cost about $400 million, were factored in.
The QSAC gambit received even more criticism last July, when this masthead revealed preliminary designs via a photocopied black-and-white image obtained via an earlier RTI application.
Now, the high-resolution version can be revealed, along with a less fully formed concept that included a roof over all stands.
The concepts are now moot, with Crisafulli accepting GIICA's recommendation that a stadium be built at Victoria Park, despite a pre-election promise that no new stadiums would be built for the Games.
Crisafulli told the Property Council lunch on Tuesday that retaining QSAC would have been the 'politically convenient' choice for his new government.
'There is no way in God's name that to go and spend a bucketload of money on temporary stands at that venue would either be a legacy play, nor would it make us look like a grown-up, mature city when the eyes of the world are on us,' he said.
'So I took the decision that I would wear the political heat for it. I owned it and I have been genuinely heartened by people who have absorbed why the decision was taken.'
The Miles government had planned to upgrade Suncorp Stadium ahead of Brisbane 2032 as the host venue for the opening and closing ceremonies.
According to renders captured in this masthead's RTI request, those upgrades would not dramatically change the 52,500-seat venue, which was largely rebuilt more than 20 years ago.
The upper corners would have been filled in with new screens, while a giant screen would have been installed overlooking the Caxton Street plaza outside the stadium.
But while Suncorp Stadium upgrades no longer feature in the government's 2032 delivery plan, the upgrades could still be on the table.
'Suncorp Stadium is a world-class stadium, and we're not going to let it wither on the vine ahead of 2032,' Crisafulli said when he unveiled the Games delivery plan in March.
'It will continue to be a world-class stadium and we will invest in it.'
Indoor Sports Centres
Chandler's old outdoor velodrome was set to make way for an indoor sports centre as part of a $257 million overhaul of the erstwhile Commonwealth Games precinct before the 2032 Olympics.
But the GIICA review found space constraints on the site would have added 'significant cost' to the project.
'While there is a strong legacy argument for developing an indoor sports centre at Chandler Sport Precinct, this is not an operationally viable option for Games time,' the GIICA report found.
The planned Sunshine Coast Indoor Sports Centre, near the outdoor stadium at Kawana, has been scrapped in favour of the planned Horizon Centre at Maroochydore.
It was a reversal of a 2023 Palaszczuk government decision to go with the Kawana sports precinct, which would have been under construction this year. The proposal had the support of then-Sunshine Coast mayor Mark Jamieson and local sporting groups.