Builders line up for $7.1b Brisbane Olympic spree
Queensland’s largest building companies welcomed Tuesday’s certainty over the location of key venues for the Brisbane 2032 Olympic Summer Games, even as they warned the original 11-year runway that has shrunk to just seven gives little time to build key facilities.
“We’ve been waiting for this day to come and we’re absolutely excited,” Mark Baker, chief executive of contractor Besix Watpac, told The Australian Financial Review. “Stadiums are our game.”
The Fortitude Valley-based company, acquired by Belgium’s Besix in 2018, has a string of recent stadium projects to its name, including the $318 million Queensland Country Bank Stadium in Townsville, It was among companies keen to win work on facilities including the new Brisbane Stadium, National Aquatic Centre and Brisbane Athletes Village.
“We’d like to do the athletes village,” said Scott Hutchinson, chairman of Hutchinson Builders, the state’s largest building contractor.
The firm widely known as Hutchies faces competition from Lendlease, which has been a partner since 2014 of RNA, the agricultural association that owns the showgrounds – home of the Ekka Royal Queensland Show and where Lendlease is building its first Australian build-to-rent project, a 443-unit tower.
A proposal by the two to locate the main athletes’ village at the showground site was adopted by the independent delivery authority and the government.
“ Lendlease and the RNA submitted a proposal to the Games Independent Infrastructure and Co-ordination Authority that offers Brisbane 2032 Olympics and Paralympics Games a world-class athletes village within the Brisbane Showgrounds,” Lendlease head of development Tom Mackellar said.
Architects welcomed the plan that puts the main stadium close to the aquatic centre and main athletes village.
“This new government has risen to the occasion,” said Caroline Stalker, president of the Queensland chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects.
“This was a very, very tough brief.”
For a city that had relatively little green space and parks, it would be crucial to create new areas with amenity to make up for the loss of space to the new stadium, Stalker said.
“The big challenge will be where does it fit, how does it fit and how do you compensate for the loss of green space?”
To free up funds under the $7.1 billion agreement between federal and state governments, Premier David Crisafulli said $2.6 billion earmarked for an arena would be reallocated for facilities including indoor sports centres in Logan and Moreton Bay and a new whitewater centre in Redland.
The arena, which could be used for basketball in the Games and longer-term as an entertainment venue – will be on the former Go Print site near the Gabba stadium and go to tender as a public-private partnership.
Operators including ASM Global and Live Nation were interested in forming consortiums to develop the arena, property sources said.
But with only seven years left until the tournament, work had to start soon, Baker said.
“They’ve got to get going on the main stadium pretty soon.
“The program I’ve seen … is not going to give a lot of time between practical completion and opening of the Games.”
Crisafulli acknowledged the tight timing.
“It is a challenge,” he said. “Get on with it we will and deliver it we will.”
Olympian and property developer Mark Stockwell said timing wasn’t an issue.
“Normally it gets announced seven years out who the host city is,” Stockwell told the Financial Review.
“What’s abnormal is the fact that we were given an opportunity 11 years out to start planning. I don’t think we’re under any delivery pressure.”
