The Queensland government has announced it will build a new $3.8bn 63,000-seat venue at Brisbane’s Victoria Park as part of plans for a main stadium and other venues for the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
According to the government’s “delivery plan”, the state will build several new facilities.
The Gabba is slated for demolition, to be replaced by a residential development.
A long-planned Brisbane Live Arena – which had been slated for the swimming – will not receive $2.5bn in commonwealth funding.
The premier, David Crisafulli, said the private sector will build the entertainment hub project at an old industrial site next to the Gabba.
He said the new aquatic centre in Victoria Park “will be the best aquatic centre in the globe”.
“Victoria Park will become home to Brisbane Stadium, designed to attract world-class events, as part of an exciting new sports and entertainment precinct in the heart of Brisbane,” the delivery plan reads.
“A new national aquatic centre will be developed at the site of the existing Centenary Pool in Spring Hill.”
The two large facilities will be just a few hundred metres apart.
The aquatic centre will feature main and secondary stadiums, each with large indoor pools to support elite training and competition. It will have a capacity of more than 25,000 during the Games and 8,000 after they end.
The Brisbane Showgrounds, which is also nearby, will host the athletes village. An earlier plan to build a new facility at Hamilton has been shelved.
Its 140-year-old heritage-listed main arena will be upgraded to a 20,000-seat capacity.
Upgrades to the Queensland Tennis Centre in Tennyson will include a new 3,000-seat show court arena and 12 new match courts.
There will also be new indoor sports centres at Logan and Moreton Bay, and a new whitewater rafting centre in the Redlands.
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“The time has come to just get on with it and get on with it we will,” Crisafulli said on Tuesday.
The new delivery plan is the third for the Brisbane Olympics.
A plan developed under Labor to hold the athletics at a temporary stadium at the Queensland Sport and Athletics Centre (Qsac) has been scrapped.
Crisafulli repeatedly promised not to build a new stadium, and particularly vowed not to do so at Victoria Park, during last year’s election campaign.
He apologised on Tuesday.
“I have to own that and I will and I am sorry and it’s my decision and I accept that decision,” Crisafulli said.
“In the end, it was a choice and there was a choice to make, and the choice was between Qsac and a new stadium, and I know which one would have been politically easier for me to make, but I’ve made the right choice.”