Former Queensland premier Campbell Newman has warned an Olympic stadium in Brisbane’s Victoria Park is lacking consideration and due process with the venue likely to have a “major impact”.
Following a 100-day infrastructure review, an independent panel recommended a major 70,000-seat stadium and indoor arena be built in Victoria Park at a cost of $3.4 billion.
Queensland Premier David Crisafulli on Tuesday confirmed the new Brisbane stadium would be one of the venues used to host the 2032 Brisbane Olympics.
The 90-hectare sporting complex above the Inner City Bypass would be within a 20 minute walk of three railway stations, including the in progress Exhibition on Cross River Rail.
Speaking to Sky News on Tuesday morning ahead of the Crisafulli government’s announcement of its list of venues, Mr Newman rejected the “salami slicing” of the heritage-listed site as he argued there were other locations worthy of consideration.
“Victoria Park was set aside 160 years ago, to be a park, a green space for the people of Brisbane for all time, but truly the central park of Brisbane,” Mr Newman said.
“And over that period, about half the park has been lost to all sorts of… plausible good ideas of the past – an inner city bypass, a busway, railway line, the Royal National Association (RNA) grounds, and the QUT campus now.
“So we’ve lost about a half of it and this just continues the salami slicing away of a park.
“It’s heritage listed, there’s Aboriginal cultural heritage issues that are quite significant, and it’s located next to the state’s major tertiary hospital, the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, which is a huge traffic generator.
“This has just been lobbed out of the blue in the last 12 months … and frankly, I don’t think there’s been enough due process or consideration of all the impacts of this site, and there are other worthy locations for a new stadium.”
The former Queensland premier said building a stadium on the parkland would take up much of the 64 hectares of space left, with the structure likely to have a “major impact”.
“When I was Lord Mayor of Brisbane, there’d be more due process to put swings in a local park, let alone a major stadium,” he said.
As a solution to the issue, Mr Newman said he was backing a concept created by a leading architect for a venue at Northshore Hamilton.
“What are the advantages of that? Well, firstly, it’s in the Gateway Arterial … It’s a brownfields industrial site, former port area, and allows you to bring people from north and south by road to the stadium along the Gateway Arterial, from the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast,” he said.
“It’s adjacent to the airport. You’ve got great opportunity for public transport services with the existing CityCat service. You can enhance that with high-speed ferry services from the CBD … You can have high capacity bus services along Kingsford Smith Drive which has been upgraded.
“It all comes together at Hamilton Northshore with a very exciting backdrop of the Brisbane CBD and it’s a brownfield site turning a degraded industrial site into something of worth for the city of Brisbane.”
