Brisbane should cancel the Olympics

Brisbane is hosting the 2032 Olympic Games. Queensland Premier David Crisafulli says the Games are a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity to make Brisbane a world city and create a “lasting legacy” of improved tourism, transport and infrastructure.

This is typical Liberal Party spin. The Olympics are a gross waste of money and a social and political nightmare. Combined federal and state spending on the Olympics will total $7.1 billion. This is triple what Queensland’s 2025-26 budget has put aside for housing support (the majority of which is handouts to developers). With more than 50,000 people on Queensland’s public housing wait list, this splashy Olympics spending is unconscionable.

Brisbane’s Victoria Park is being demolished to build the Olympic stadium. Deputy Premier Jarod Bleijie mocked the Save Victoria Park campaign when unveiling the stadium plan on 6 January, saying: “This park ... was a golf course, and before it was a golf course it was a dump for goodness sake”.

Victoria Park was a gathering point for Indigenous peoples prior to and during the Frontier Wars. At times up to 800 people would meet around the central lake, known as Barrambin by the Yuggera and Turrbal people.

This is no secret. As recently as 2020, Liberal National Party Lord Mayor of Brisbane Adrian Schrinner told the Brisbane Times that “Victoria Park has a really rich Indigenous history” when announcing that city council would establish an Indigenous history centre to make sure the history “is acknowledged, recognised and celebrated”. Those plans have been scrapped for the Olympic stadium.

The Olympics, and the destruction of Victoria Park, will also make Brisbane more unequal.

After Sydney hosted the 2000 Olympics, house prices in suburbs near the stadium grew by more than 66 percent, according to the ABC. This does not augur well for Brisbane’s inner-North, where Victoria Park is located, which already has some of the most expensive houses, highest rents and exclusive schools in Queensland.

Countries hosting the Olympics reliably use the occasion to attack civil liberties, militarise the police, commercialise public space and restrict the right to demonstrate. Brazil deployed 65,000 police officers and 20,000 soldiers during the 2016 Rio Olympics. At least six people were killed by police during the Games.

Queensland has recent experience of using global events to attack democratic rights. Police raided the homes of activists involved in protesting the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games. Earlier, in 2014, $400 million was spent on policing and surveillance for the G20 meeting in Brisbane, the largest security operation in Australian history.

So, the Olympics aren’t packing goodies for Brisbane. Even if they were, the Games promote nationalism and conservatism on steroids.

What foosball is to soccer, the Olympics are to imperialism. The world’s richest nations, engaging in the most cut-throat military and economic competition, send their athletes out in little proxy wars. “Doing the nation proud” mostly means beating the main diplomatic enemy.

As Wanning Sun wrote in Crikey in August 2024, “a country’s gold medal tally is a crude but effective way of showcasing a nation’s strength”. Unsurprisingly, the United States and China have been the closest competitors, biggest winners and biggest spenders in recent years. The Games are a seemingly innocent chance to stir national fervour and remind observers to be passionately invested in the fate of their team and flag.

The Games are also vehicles for right wing culture wars. The International Olympic Committee announced the return of sex testing of athletes in 2025, following the example of World Athletics the previous year. This measure discriminates against and excludes transwomen while humiliating cisgendered women like South African champion runner Caster Semenya and Algerian Boxer Imane Khelif, who do not meet criteria of biological sex arbitrarily defined by Olympic committees, or their image of a “proper woman”.

As far as sports go, the Olympics promotes the worst, most elite version: ultra-competitive, hyper exclusive, institutionally oppressive, obsessed with perfection measured to the millimetre or millisecond. Many athletes are ruined in the Olympic grind and there are endless stories of abuse. Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast in history, was among many Olympians who spoke out in 2021 of repeated sexual abuse by team doctor Larry Nasser. Biles told a Senate committee, “I blame Larry Nasser, and I also blame an entire system that enabled and perpetrated his abuse”.

For these reasons, there is a long history of left-wing opposition to the Olympics, and a symbolism and tradition of protesting the Games. Most famously, in 1968, Black United States athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists during a medal ceremony in solidarity with the struggle for civil rights and to highlight the murder of Mexican student activists days before the Games began.

French rebels carried on the tradition in Paris 2024, the most recent Olympics. Workers servicing the Games, from garbage collectors to dancers, went on strike in the lead up, and the events were punctuated by protests opposing Israel’s genocide in Palestine.

Activists should support the Save Victoria Park campaign—and call for the Olympics to be cancelled. It is a shame to see former opponents of the Games like Greens MP for Maiwar Michael Berkman join the dialogue about the Olympics posing a generational opportunity to reshape Brisbane for the better. Not only is it naive, backing the Olympics is a terrible way to win the rights and amenities workers need.

We should reject glitzy corporate mega-spending during a cost-of-living crisis, and the litany of right-wing values the Olympics promote. If former Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews could withdraw Victoria’s pledge to host the Commonwealth Games in 2023 (three years before the event), Queensland can pull out of the Olympics.

While the “eyes of the world” are on Brisbane, we should turn the tables on the sanitised “Sunshine state” image politicians are promoting. We should expose and protest the inequality championed by Australia’s elite and the Games.