CIOB top brass check in on Brisbane, now gearing up for the 2032 Olympics

During their visit to Australia this month, CIOB President Paul Gandy and chief executive Dr Victoria Hills checked in on Brisbane, which is now gearing up for the Brisbane 2032 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.

In December, a consortium led by Laing O’Rourke and Aecom was named delivery partner for the A$7.1bn (£3.75bn) Games build-out.

Reviving a partnership formed to deliver the London 2012 Games, their “Unite32” team will be responsible for 17 new and upgraded venues in the state of Queensland in locations ranging from the Gold Coast south of Brisbane all the way up to Cairns, some 1,760km to the north on Australia’s eastern seaboard.

Centrepiece venues include the brand new, 63,0000-seat Brisbane Stadium, set to host the opening and closing ceremonies and athletics, and thereafter to be the city’s main stadium.

It’ll go up in Brisbane’s Victoria Park Precinct, now being master-planned for the Games by Arup.

Also going up in the park precinct will be the Athlete’s Village, set to be housing after the Games, and the new National Aquatic Centre, which will be Australia’s headquarters for water sports post-Games with a permanent capacity of 8,000 seats (25,000 during the tournament).

‘I can give you the best you can have’

While in Brisbane, Paul Gandy took part in a panel discussion at Victoria Park about delivering the venues and infrastructure for the Games.

He highlighted the need for a clear vision of the long-term legacy and a thorough understanding of what local communities will gain after the Games conclude. Drawing on lessons from London, he noted that transport infrastructure and connectivity are critical for delivering a successful event and ensuring lasting benefits for the region.

Asked what he thought CIOB and its members could bring to make Brisbane 2032 “the best Olympics ever”, Gandy said: “I think what the professions and professional contractors bring is competence. Being a professional is a demonstration that you want to be the best you can be, you want to maintain your social confidence, your professional capability, your technical capability, and it’s a badge that says to customers and the public, ‘I can give you the best you can have’.”

CIOB’s understated influence

The discussion was moderated by Alan Patching, professor of construction management at Queensland’s Bond University, who was project director and owning-entity chief executive for the design and construction of the Sydney Olympic Stadium for the Sydney 2000 Games.

At 115,0000 capacity, it remains the biggest purpose-built Olympics stadium ever constructed, and it finished on time and budget.

Speaking to GCR after the discussion, Patching said he believed CIOB plays a far bigger role in Australian construction professional competence “than they would ever imagine they do”.

“This is the academic side of me coming through. It’s a really good question,” he said. “I’ve never been asked that before, but CIOB accredits multiple university degrees in Australia. I’d go so far as to say if they’re not CIOB-accredited, they’re on the light side in terms of their accreditation.

“We’re writing our courses to suit the demands of bodies like CIOB so, in that sense, we’ve been developing over the last 10 years the people who will be on the design teams, the construction management teams, the project management teams who’ve gone through and done our degrees.

“If you did a study on how many people are involved in Olympic projects and find out which universities they went to, I bet well over 70% were educated at a university that was accredited by CIOB, among others.”

Will Brisbane be ready for 2032?

With the Brisbane Games kicking off on 23 July 2032, teams have 76 months and four days to get everything built and tested.

Patching was confident the venues would be ready – “Because,” he said, “there’s never been an Olympic Games in history where they didn’t get a finish.”

He went on: “Now, we’ve got six years to go and three months and everybody’s going, wow, wow, wow, wow.

“If you take it back to Australia in 1996 in July, I was engaged as the project director and CEO for the Sydney Olympic Stadium. In 1999, 30 months later to the day, it was done with not one day’s time extension, not one dollar over the original budget, no variations except a couple of internal ones to increase stadium capacity.


“It gave us a full 18 months before the Olympics, which meant two full seasons of football. And you might say, well, so what? It wasn’t about revenue. Well, it was, but it was more about testing security, testing transport, testing volunteer systems, all those sorts of things.

“And Olympic standards are very different. During the Games you’ve got to get everybody emptied and another crowd in and resupply all the stores and booze and food in a two or three-hour period. So that affects the design. We chilled the bottom of a garbage chute down to 13ºC so we could leave the food overnight and take it out the next morning without it smelling.

“We put all the CO2 in the basement and pumped it up because we didn’t have time to haul it up to all the levels. Now, the problem with that is you’ve got six kilometres of lines full of beer at the end of the night, so you better time when you’re going to turn it off or you’re going to have, you know, some very expensive beer being poured out of the lines down the track! That’s not the ideal design, but it’s what we had to do.”

‘People want to tell their family’

Patching acknowledged the state of Queensland suffers scarcity in skills and labour, but said that wouldn’t affect the Olympics per se.

“I’m optimistic because there will be a preference for most contractors, subcontractors and individuals to get involved in Olympics,” he said. “People just want to be able to tell their family they’re involved with the Olympics. It’s an amazing phenomenon. We had people coming from the UK just to take any job so they could get on the Olympics. It’s just the way it goes.

“But can they take it easy? No, they can’t. Because when you’ve got global events like we’ve got at the moment, they could affect it in all sorts of ways. But they should be fine provided they turn soil in June-July, which they’re on target to do.”