Garth Hamilton (Groom, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

How can I possibly follow a speech on the Olympics from an Olympian? It's an impossible task. It can't be done. But I'll give it a go. The member for Hunter does a great job talking up sport in Australia. I agree with his enthusiasm, and I think it's important that we do stand up and congratulate everyone who competed in the Olympic Games, wearing the green and gold. Once you're wearing those colours, you're ours. We get behind them. It has been fantastic to watch that. Like in a lot of families, I sat with my kids, watching a whole range of sports that I will probably never watch again until the next Olympics rolls around. But I think that's part of what it is—giving kids a view of what they can do and achieve, and that's one of the best things about the Olympics. I watched a little bit of shooting. The Turkish shooter certainly drew a bit of attention. I'm not sure how he goes against you, member for Hunter!

I do want to talk about this, because I think there is an important conversation to have about the Olympics, this role it plays in the national psyche and what they do for us as a country. Thinking back to the Sydney Olympics is a great point. Look what it did for us. I think it's right for us to turn towards those 2032 Olympics and really see what we went to get out of it. But I do want to pay some tribute to the people who got that bid off the ground, because people don't remember this. The Brisbane 2032 Olympics was originally the South-East Queensland Olympics.

Absolutely, Graeme. I think it's important to point these people out. You know who else it was? It was my former mayor from the Toowoomba Regional Council, Paul Antonio. Paul spoke about this at the Council of Mayors South East Queensland and was laughed at. 'There's no way you can have a regional Olympic Games. There's no way South-East Queensland mayors can get together and pull an Olympics together.' To his credit, when the state government of the day and the federal government weren't confident, Paul and other members from that group, like Graham Quirk representing Brisbane City Council, pushed on. And the Olympic Games morphed, and people started to get behind it. It became, over time, the Brisbane Games. I think it is reasonable. While we're looking forward to it, I think it's important to look back at the people who pursued this idea and got us those games.

One of the issues we have had and one of the reasons I raise that is that, since that time, the role of South-East Queensland in the games has diminished significantly. I think that's unfortunate, because it was from these regional heartlands that this idea came about. We went through a very difficult conversation about the upgrades for the Toowoomba Sports Ground that were proposed to be part of these Olympics. This was really a substandard offering for the people of Toowoomba. We weren't going to get an actual football game. What we were going to get was a preliminary warm-up game in Toowoomba and, rather than get legacy infrastructure, what we were offered was temporary stands added onto the Toowoomba stadium. To put this in context, what these temporary stands mean is that you don't have to have noise abatement or light abatement—and, unfortunately, this stadium is in the middle of an suburban area.

The local residents, quite rightly, raised their concerns about having a temporary structure brought into play. This was a problem. The people of Toowoomba spoke up when Mr Quirk ran his review of Olympic infrastructure, and he came back and removed the Toowoomba stadium from the plan for the 2032 Olympics. That was a good move because the people in and around the stadium did not support it. It had no legacy benefits for the area.

We now find ourselves having a very direct conversation in Toowoomba with the organisers of the 2032 Olympics about what would actually be legacy infrastructure for our region. What comes back time and time again is the equestrian centre proposal that's been put forward for the showgrounds. Somewhere around 60 per cent of Queensland's thoroughbreds come from my area. Equestrian is a huge sport. Overwhelmingly, it's a sport dominated by women. My sister was one of them. We've seen that change. If you go to a pony club nowadays, it's a sport where women absolutely dominate. This is a great thing. It's something that I think our region can get behind.

Whilst we're reflecting on what was an excellent Olympics for Australia, I hope we can look forward and see that we need that legacy infrastructure coming to regional areas. They're the areas that brought the Olympics to Brisbane. They're the ones that believed in it all the way through. (Time expired)

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