The Queensland Government’s 2032 Delivery Plan, released in March 2025, sets out a $7.1 billion venue capital works programme for the Brisbane Olympic and Paralympic Games. Yet the document meant to steer the city’s biggest infrastructure push in decades leaves two conspicuous gaps: no east–west underground metro for the inner city, and no big-picture vision for Northshore.
The plan covers a new 63,000-seat Brisbane Stadium at Victoria Park; a National Aquatic Centre on the Centenary Pool site at Spring Hill; a major overhaul of the RNA Showgrounds, including an upgraded 20,000-seat Main Arena and an Athlete Village that will become permanent housing after the Games; and a transport package spanning new rail lines and stations, northern and eastern bus corridors, M1 upgrades and faster rail to the Gold Coast. On the Sunshine Coast, a project called The Wave will run heavy rail from Beerwah to Birtinya, connecting with a metro-style service through Maroochydore to Sunshine Coast Airport.
Why Brisbane needs an underground tying Brisbane’s east and west together. Cross River Rail will add new underground stations beneath the CBD, but it runs north–south. Beyond that, the plan’s transport section is about new stations and upgraded corridors. Nothing in it threads an underground line across the inner city. Brisbane Development readers clearly feel the gap: when the site asked which infrastructure projects were most needed before the Games, “Underground Metro Linking East and West SEQ” came out on top.
The fast-tracking bill and what it strips out
The plan’s rollout has brought controversy of its own. In May 2025 the government introduced a bill amending the Brisbane Olympic and Paralympic Games Arrangements Act so that Games projects could proceed even if they did not comply with 15 other Acts, among them the Planning Act 2016, the Environmental Protection Act 1994 and the Queensland Heritage Act 1992. Parliament passed it in June 2025.
The changes also shut off statutory appeals and judicial review for those projects. On a visit to Brisbane while the bill was before Parliament, the chair of the IOC Coordination Commission, Mikaela Cojuangco-Jaworski, suggested the changes were about ‘fast tracking, and not circumventing’.
It’s a long way from where Brisbane started. When the city was bidding for the Games, the IOC said around 80 per cent of the proposed venues already existed or would be temporary. The reformed host-selection process was meant to keep costs down and lock in lasting community benefit. Today’s delivery plan looks very different from that original pitch.
Northshore still waiting on a government plan
Northshore Hamilton is Queensland’s largest waterfront urban renewal project, and it is not short of a government plan as such. It is a Priority Development Area run by Economic Development Queensland (EDQ), whose development scheme was amended in November 2025 to speed up delivery of around 10,000 homes. In September 2026 EDQ chose five Queensland developers to build nearly 2,200 homes on a 6.1-hectare riverfront parcel, with construction due to start in early 2028. Moving the main Athlete Village to Bowen Hills is what freed the land up.
What the government hasn’t produced is a precinct-wide vision for what Northshore could be for the city. The boldest idea on the table is still “Northshore Vision 2050”, unveiled in August 2024 by the Brisbane Design Alliance, a team made up of Buchan, HKS, NRA Collaborative, Aurecon and Nikken Sekkei.
It centres on a 60,000-seat stadium with an adjacent aquatic centre, a wave pool, a retail and hospitality zone, and riverfront promenades. Stage One, designed with the 2032 Games in mind, would deliver the stadium, warm-up facilities and a 2,500-apartment athletes’ village alongside hotels and restaurants. Over the following 15 years, later stages would add 12,000 more apartments and townhouses; enterprise, innovation and cultural zones; a high-performance sports science and sports medicine hub; and a central park. An elevated “highline” walkway would run to Doomben Station, and a green bridge across the river would link to Bulimba.
The alliance proposes a private finance model to keep costs to the state down. [see note 9] But it remains a private-sector vision. The government’s plan puts the new stadium at Victoria Park, not Northshore, and makes no reference to Vision 2050.
What happens next
The Games Independent Infrastructure and Coordination Authority (GIICA), which carried out the 100-day review behind the delivery plan, is now responsible for delivering the venues. The fast-tracking law is on the books, and a draft legacy plan for the Victoria Park precinct has been released. For Northshore, the open question is whether the state will ever think bigger than housing lots: whether it adopts, adapts or quietly shelves Vision 2050. Then there is whether an east–west underground line will feature in inner-city transport planning before 2032. On current form, Brisbane shouldn’t hold its breath. .
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Source: Queensland Government, Delivering 2032, Queensland Parliament, Brisbane Development
