Submission into the LNP's Brisbane 2032 Olympics venue review

Here's a copy of my hastily-written, 6-page submission to the Queensland government's '1oo day review' into venues and infrastructure for the Brisbane 2032 Olympics.

I'm sharing it here not because I think it makes for particularly gripping reading, but because I'd written it anyway and I figured a few people might be interested in what I'd said (even if the LNP-appointed property developers running the review don't pay it much attention). For those who missed it, this short article explains why I don't have much faith in the review process.

I should stress again for anyone who does read this that right now, in early 2025, I remain convinced that the best approach Brisbane can take is to pull out of hosting the Olympics altogether. Except in specific contexts like this, where the venue review's narrow terms of reference presume a Brisbane Olympics is going ahead, the best position most of us should stick to (including any politicians who are concerned about social justice and sustainability) is to refuse to try to solve the impossible challenges that hosting the Olympics presents for Brisbane, and decline to answer questions like "well where do you want the venues to go?" altogether.

Submission into the 100 Day Review of Brisbane 2032 Olympic venues and infrastructure

I write this submission as a long-term Brisbane resident, who spent the first 20 years of my life in West Chermside, before moving into the inner-city as a young adult about 15 years ago. I currently live in East Brisbane and work as a writer, musician and events organiser. My insights and perspectives are heavily shaped by my experiences as an elected city councillor who represented the Gabba Ward of Brisbane City Council from April 2016 until April 2023.

Representing a rapidly-growing inner-city electorate of approximately 40 000 permanent residents (plus many more short-term visitors, international students etc), including serving for many years on Brisbane City Council’s Transport and City Planning committees, has given me a robust and well-rounded understanding not only of the views of everyday Brisbane residents, but of the city’s long-term urban planning needs.

I should note that a few years ago, I was the only Brisbane City Councillor to vote against Brisbane bidding to host the Olympics, and I remain of the view that it would be better for Queensland if we weren’t hosting. However, if a Brisbane Olympics does go ahead, I want it to leave a positive legacy for our city, and for the purposes of this submission I’m limiting my commentary to issues and questions which are within the review committee’s terms of reference.

My submission is structured as follows:

• broader commentary about the need to minimise Olympic infrastructure costs and land use
• key advantages of utilising Nathan as the main stadium venue
• further concerns regarding various Olympic venue proposals

A question of trade-offs

It’s well-established that hosting the Olympics is a loss-making proposition. The world comes to have a party, and locals in the host city have to bear the costs and deal with the cleanup for many years to come.

Brisbane 2032 will be particularly unusual as South-East Queensland is – in terms of workforce, total population, gross regional product, and housing stock – by far the smallest Olympic host city in the modern era. Whereas much larger preceding host cities like Beijing, London, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Paris and Los Angeles are better able to absorb and distribute the impacts of such a major event, a smaller city like Brisbane will feel these impacts more dramatically. These impacts can include surging demand for short-term accommodation and associated upward pressure on housing costs, shortages of construction materials and construction workforce capacity, and delays to urgent, essential projects that would otherwise take priority if not for the distraction of hosting the Olympics.

In light of this, Brisbane 2032 planners should take a cautious and sceptical approach towards calls for new venues. Every additional stadium and arena carries a significant opportunity cost in terms of what else Queensland could have done with that money, land and construction capacity.

While Brisbane’s outer suburbs are generally better served in terms of access to both public parkland and private backyard green space, inner-Brisbane is increasingly suffering from a chronic shortage of public green space. Local parks and nature reserves are even more important to apartment residents than they are to residents with larger houses and yards. Inner-city residents are increasingly having to travel longer distances by car to access sport and recreation opportunities, undermining one of the key supposed benefits of densification.

As Brisbane’s inner-city population grows, expecting more and more residents to commute on a regular basis to access green spaces in the suburbs and urban fringe will be inefficient and unsustainable. Apartment residents need parks, nature reserves and public sports fields close to where they live. If an existing inner-city park is converted into Olympic venues, an equivalent area of land in the local area would necessarily need to be found, acquired and converted into parkland to offset that lost (at a cost to taxpayers of many billions of dollars).

So any decision to use inner-urban land to build a new stadium or arena will mean that site can’tbe used for housing or public parkland. Large, well-located urban greenfield and brownfield sites are hard to come by, and construction materials and construction workforce capacity are finite resources. In that context, any decision to build new venues is effectively also a decision to cancel the construction of public housing, schools, hospitals, and parks that would otherwise be created in those areas.

Rather than cancelling public housing, school and hospital projects, and depriving high-density neighbourhoods of essential green space, we must strive to reuse existing venues. This is particularly important in a context where Brisbane 2032 is supposedly a ‘carbon positive’ games.

Constructing large new venues carries an enormous carbon footprint.Regardless of whether the IOC technically requires new venue construction to be included in carbon emission calculations regarding the ‘carbon positive’ goal, the optics of building large new concrete and steel stadiums and arenas for the Olympics would make a mockery of the event’s environmental credentials. Any time a Queensland politician or IOC official tries to claim Brisbane 2032 is ‘carbon positive,’ the world will simply point to the new stadiums being constructed and laugh derisively. Noting significant, widespread criticism of the legitimacy of carbon offset schemes, it is arguably impossible for an Olympics that requires construction of major new stadiums to be truly ‘carbon positive.’

Athlete villages must be public housing

For decades, governments have under-estimated in public housing, creating a situation where more and more low-income residents are becoming homeless. If public funds and public land are to be used in constructing athlete village accommodation, it is essential that 100% of these dwellings are converted into genuine public housing after the Olympics.

To address concerns about over-concentration of tenants with high needs, this public housing could be made available to a wider range of demographics including key workers, however it is important that these buildings remain under public ownership and control, rather than being sold off or rented out for profit.

Use existing venues – the case for Nathan

The QSAC site at Nathan has been hastily dismissed by some commentators and politicians, but I suggest it deserves a second look. While I still believe that Brisbane should cut its losses and back out of hosting the 2032 Olympics altogether, if wemustfind an athletic stadium option for major events like the Olympics, Nathan is the best choice.

The existing site footprint already includes a full-size athletic warm-up track adjacent to the stadium (a key IOC requirement which proved to be a major challenge for the previous Gabba stadium plans) and sprawling, flat, open-air carparks that can facilitate stadium upgrade works and offer space for supporting venues and facilities – possibly even the major swimming venue.

The Nathan site’s location adjacent to Toohey Forest also tells an important story, offering an opportunity to showcase a unique Brisbane feature that sets it apart from other Olympic cities. With approximately 640 hectares of intact, multi-layered forest, the combined area of Toohey Forest and Mt Gravatt Outlook Reserve makes this green space one of the largest urban forests of its kind in the world. Few large cities can boast such a densely vegetated natural green space just 8km from the central business district.

In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers could find no evidence of koalas in Toohey Forest – they were deemed locally extinct. However in recent decades, the cross-suburb migration and reintroduction of a few individual koalas from other bushland reserves has resulted in a renewed, growing koala population within the reserve. Environmentally speaking, this is borderline miraculous. For koalas to be surviving and breeding in a forest reserve on the cusp of the inner-city, surrounded by residential and industrial development on all sides, is a positive news story about ecological recovery that ought to be shared with the world. For a relatively small investment in restoration, the ecological value of Toohey Forest could be further enhanced significantly. From a tourism perspective, the optics of athletes jogging around the warm-up track, mere metres from where wild koalas are feeding in the trees, is hard to beat. Spectators would be able to stroll through the forest on koala-spotting tours before and after watching events.

But the biggest benefits of using the Nathan site are urban planning-related.

One of Brisbane’s persistent problems is that while a select few inner-city suburbs are continually redeveloping, becoming denser and denser, most of Brisbane’s footprint remains low-density, sprawling, car-centric suburbs. For years now, we have excessively densified walkable inner-city neighbourhoods that are arguably already dense enough, while neglecting to build the public transport infrastructure and mixed-use medium-density housing required to transition the city’s middle suburbs away away from car-dependence.

For example, immediately to the south of Nathan, the suburb of Robertson has a population density of just 25 residents per hectare, with over 60% of workers dependent on cars for daily travel. Brisbane needs a new model of urban renewal that decentralises and distributes commerce and development, rather than doubling down on the inner-city.

Large new venue projects in inner-Brisbane are unlikely to catalyse additional new development beyond what would already otherwise occur over coming years. Even if the Olympics weren’t happening, suburbs like Woolloongabba, Fortitude Valley and Hamilton would continue to densify. If anything, the inflationary impacts on land value, the disruption from stadium construction work, and the attached uncertainty could mean new inner-city venues lead to delays in the construction of new housing and essential infrastructure.

But a revitalisation of the Nathan precinct would catalyse opportunities to redevelop large industrial and commercial sites in MacGregor, immediately to the east of the stadium site, as well as smaller-scale medium-density projects throughout Salisbury, Robertson, Nathan, Coopers Plains and Upper Mt Gravatt. The approximately 20 hectares of warehouse sites along Kessels Rd in MacGregor could even be redeveloped as athlete village accommodation, and repurposed as public housing after the games.

Nathan’s obvious limitation is public transport connectivity, but numerous options can be considered to address this. A new light rail line that runs from the inner-city down Ipswich Rd and Beaudesert Rd before running east-west along Kessels Rd between Salisbury train station and Westfield Mt Gravatt would provide much-needed connectivity benefits across the south-side, improving public transport access not just for the QSAC precinct, but for Griffith University and QEII hospital.

Alternatively or additionally, spur lines from the South-East busway and the Beenleigh train line could be explored to fill the existing public transport gaps around Robertson, Nathan, the eastern side of Salisbury, and the western side of MacGregor.

Rather than wasting billions of dollars on new stadium construction, that money should be directed towards improving public transport to and between Brisbane’s southern suburbs. New public transport investment would provide the necessary catalyst for the redevelopment opportunities described above.

When considering whether Nathan is an appropriate site for the Olympics, Brisbane decision-makers would be wise to evaluate the area not as it is, but as it could be. If the city is serious about the Olympics leaving a positive legacy for South-East Queensland, that should take the form of public transport investment, redevelopment of suburban industrial precincts, and ecological restoration of special places like Toohey Forest, rather than wasting billions of dollars converting high-value, government-owned, inner-city land into space-intensive white elephant venues.

Barrambin/Victoria Park must be ruled out

The arguments against large venues in Victoria Park are numerous and strong, and I won’t outline them all here. My opposition to using Barrambin for the Olympics is clearly articulated in this opinion piece.

However I do want to briefly emphasise two points which I believe the review committee should give greater weight towards:

1. Recent proposals for venues in Victoria Park have claimed they would deliver a net increase in public space by building over the inner-city bypass. These are misleading. When you dig into the details, the ‘net increase’ in public space would mostly be derived simply by converting a public carpark and golf driving range into open space. These improvements can (and should) easily be implemented without the catalyst of the Olympics. On the other hand, building over the ICBand rail corridoris likely to be much more expensive and complicated than proponents anticipate.
2. Barrambin’s significance to First Nations people means redevelopment of the park is likely to generate a large backlash from Aboriginal groups. I encourage review committee members to research more deeply the cultural and historical significance of this public park, and recognise that the remaining Barrambin green space was preserved from development during Brisbane’s early years in part because of persistent occupation and strong resistance from the local Aboriginal community. The Brisbane 2032 story must not be “Indigenous custodians object to stadium being built on Aboriginal sacred site.” If Victoria Park is chosen as a venue site, resistance to the construction project will be fierce, persistent and prolonged even after the contracts have been signed.

Hamilton proposal can’t ignore value of government land

Proposals for new major venues at Hamilton have downplayed and underestimated the value of the government-owned land which this would require. While extending the Doomben train line to Hamilton would deliver significant long-term benefits, it’s important that land values are factored into any calculations regarding the costs and benefits of new venues at Hamilton. To hand over several billion dollars’ worth of government land for new venues in addition to spending billions more on stadium construction is irresponsible and short-sighted.

It’s important to note that much of the Hamilton riverfront is vulnerable to flooding, and that any proposed venues would have to be constructed on higher ground above the flood levels. But flood-free sites so close to the city would be better utilised for public housing and community facilities.

Woolloongabba is a non-starter

To date, Olympics venue planning in Queensland has repeatedly underestimated the relevance and significance of local resistance. Residents of Woolloongabba, Kangaroo Point and East Brisbane have firmly rejected previous proposals to redevelop the Gabba and shut down East Brisbane State School. Residents are also eager to see the Queensland government deliver on previous commitments that the majority of the Gabba Cross River Rail train station site would be preserved for public parkland.

Mega-projects of this scale, so close to so many residential homes, simply cannot proceed successfully and cost-effectively in the face of sustained local opposition. I know plenty of residents who would be willing to risk prison time sabotaging equipment and disrupting construction work to save our local school. No construction company would put in a serious tender to work on such a project if they properly evaluated the risks of disruptive protests, strikes and boycotts throughout the construction timeline.

International Broadcast Centre must be relocated

The site currently proposed for the International Broadcast Centre on Montague Road in South Brisbane is highly floodprone. Almost all of the site is below the 1% Annual Exceedance Probability level – that is, below the ‘1 in 100 years’ flood level – for the Brisbane River. Given that it’s increasingly unlikely that major Olympics venues will be located on Brisbane’s inner-south side, the review committee should also recommend a new site for the International Broadcast Centre and allow the Montague Rd site to be used for its previous intended purpose of public parkland.

Conclusion

While I have further significant concerns and insights to share regarding Olympic infrastructure needs and various smaller venue proposals, the poor timing and short duration of this public submissions process did not allow for a more thorough submission, and gives me little confidence that the review committee is seriously interested in the views of the general public.

If the committee is interested in further, more detailed submissions from me before reaching conclusions, I would appreciate the opportunity to meet with committee representatives, or to provide more detail on whichever specific matters the committee is most interested in my perspective on.

Good luck in your deliberations.

Warm regards,
Jonathan Sriranganathan
office@jonathansri.com