If you go back about four years, you’ll see that the political shenanigans in Queensland served as a portent to the future all along.
By July 2021, then-Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, having shut down Queensland due to COVID-19, left the country to attend the 138th session of the International Olympic Committee, convened in Tokyo to coincide with the Games of the XXXII Olympiad.
That Palaszczuk should have been in Tokyo amid the political grandstanding about whether Queensland or Western Australia could lay claim to being the most sterile and mean jurisdiction during the pandemic certainly raised eyebrows.
Her practised astonishment and faux celebrating, unleashed once the masked-up IOC President Thomas Bach announced Brisbane as the winner in the one-horse race to host the 2032 Olympic Games, was cringeworthy.
The optics of Palaszczuk being in Japan in the first place – let alone the prioritisation of her return to the country when she jumped ahead of thousands of Australians left languishing overseas for weeks or months – was both brazen and abhorrent.
In the three years and nine months since, the conduct of successive Queensland governments in relation to Olympic and Paralympic planning has been aimless and chaotic. The planning for Brisbane 2032 has been a national embarrassment.
New infrastructure planned for the Brisbane 2032 Olympic summer Games includes a main stadium, aquatic centre and a main athletes village on the site of the RNA showgrounds.
One is forced to wonder what Bach and the incoming IOC President Kirsty Coventry actually think of the unedifying nature of what’s sometimes best resembled a slow-motion car crash. Huge trust has been placed in Brisbane; whether that trust is misguided still must be questioned.
For mine, I’ve been left with the definite impression that there is a case of buyer’s remorse in Queensland. Given the option of making the choice again in 2025, I think we’d find there’s no unbridled desire for Brisbane to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2032.
How otherwise might it be explained away that former Premier Steven Miles reckoned Lang Park (Suncorp Stadium) could host the Opening Ceremony on 23 July 2032? How otherwise could anyone ever have justified current Queensland Premier David Crisafulli’s now-abandoned political recriminating and promises of constructing no new stadia for the Games? How did that idea work out?
Olympic Games and Paralympic Games hosting rights are awarded to cities, not regions and certainly not countries. Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Sydney and Rio De Janeiro – each of those destinations properly are cities of the world. Each struggled in many ways to host the Games. The legacy left behind, in each instance, is questionable.
Annastacia Palaszczuk’s in Tokyo in 2021.Credit: Getty Images
By contrast, Brisbane is a big country town. I last had the pleasure of visiting there in 2017. It’s a place replete with rustic charms. A visit to Brisbane’s Entertainment Centre remains seared into my psyche, as do the words of the warning emblazoned outside the men’s room at the venue, which read: “Snakes active in this area – please flush before use.” Helpfully, there was also a graphic, depicting the typical snake inhabitants of the venue.
While I desperately hope I’m proved wrong, I wonder whether Brisbane has the actual capacity – as well as the unbridled desire – to host an Olympic Games and then a Paralympic Games in pretty quick succession.
These are almost unquantifiable undertakings for any city. Brisbane just might not be up to meeting the challenge. Because you can’t play host to the biggest show on earth in some equivocal manner that also satisfies those whingers opposed to the Games.
Rather, to play host to a successful Games, organisers must put in all of their poker chips, and then add more. Brave ideas and definiteness are needed. The conduct of successive Queensland governments since mid-2021 has been none of that; it’s been an embarrassment of exasperation, political point-scoring and voodoo economics.
‘I’ve been left with the definite impression that there is a case of buyer’s remorse in Queensland.’
Now that Queensland’s Games Independent Infrastructure and Coordination Authority has completed its 100-day review into the infrastructure requirements for Brisbane 2032, and now that the Queensland government has announced what the infrastructure plans are (until they change them further down the track), the government might hope the noise stops.
It mustn’t. This is Brisbane’s third crack at coming up with a plan that is supposed to be convincing, even if it is not compelling. Governments love to commission reviews because governments then have a report to fall back on to justify decision-making.
Governments must be held strictly to account on such matters. Presently, there’s no evidence that Queensland’s new political cohort have any better skills and qualifications to organise an Olympic and Paralympic Games, compared to those they replaced.
Hosting the rowing and canoe competition on a river in Rockhampton may be a solution, but it’s at the very least a weird one if the river runs with currents that cause that venue to contravene World Rowing’s technical requirements. The whole crocodile infestation thing is a bit of a furphy but currents potentially making fast and slow lanes in the regatta area certainly aren’t.
Proposing to send some sports competitions to Queensland’s regional outposts isn’t a unique idea but it does impact on the idea that Games are awarded to cities and not regions or countries.
That Crisafulli abandoned his vote-trawling promises of constructing no new stadia for the Games will surely now ignite the debate over spending on new stadia and sports infrastructure.
If history is a predictor of the future, Crisafulli’s announcements this week must be treated with the utmost caution. For the underwhelming scattergun of penny-pinching politics that consumed the last four years of Brisbane’s Olympic and Paralympic planning can’t be swept away in one week.
The planning and decision-making for forthcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games demands bravery and clear thinking. Politicians aren’t really all that good at either.
