At East Brisbane State School, the classrooms on Wellington Road sit close enough to the Gabba that on match days the roar of the crowd carries over the fence. The school has stood there since 1899, and its heritage-listed brick buildings were added to the Queensland Heritage Register in November 1994. In February 2023, the families who send their children through those gates learned that the school's home of more than a century would be flattened along with the stadium next door, to make way for a rebuilt Gabba for the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Thirteen months later, after a state election, a change of premier and an independent review, that plan no longer existed. The school stayed. The Gabba rebuild did not proceed. And Queensland was left to explain what thirteen months of design work, community consultation and a $100 million-plus school relocation plan had actually bought it.
A $2.7 billion demolition, and a school in its path
Brisbane's winning bid for the 2032 Games, confirmed in 2021, assumed the city's existing stadiums could mostly be reused. The Gabba, Brisbane's 100-plus-year-old cricket and Australian Football League ground, was the exception. The then Palaszczuk Labor government's first firm plan, costed at about $1 billion (2021, approx.), was to rebuild it. On 17 February 2023, the government announced a much larger version of that plan: a full demolition and rebuild of the Gabba at a cost of $2.7 billion, delivering a 50,000-seat stadium anchoring a wider Woolloongabba renewal precinct that was also promised to include social and affordable housing.
That announcement carried a direct cost for East Brisbane State School. Queensland's Department of Education confirmed the school could not remain at its Wellington Road site beyond December 2025. On 3 August 2023, the then Education Minister, Grace Grace, announced the school would be rebuilt as a standalone campus on the grounds of Coorparoo Secondary College, with a government commitment of more than $100 million and, in the initial announcement, a promise of "state-of-the-art" new facilities including a swimming pool. That relocation had a knock-on cost of its own: Coorparoo was already home to the Brisbane School of Distance Education, a state school of roughly 3,450 students and 300-plus teachers (approx.) who deliver and receive schooling remotely across Queensland, and that school in turn had to find a new site to make room. By the time the master plan for the new East Brisbane campus was released later in 2023, the promise of state-of-the-art facilities and a pool had narrowed to "new and refurbished" buildings, a scaling-back the school's Parents and Citizens Association and the wider community publicly criticised before the relocation was cancelled altogether.
Behind the political announcements, the Gabba project moved through the state's own capital works approval process. The Project Validation Report that underpinned the February 2023 announcement had tested four options, ranging from refurbishing the existing stadium to a full demolition and rebuild; the government's own assessment found full demolition and rebuild delivered the best value and the best fit against its stated goals of urban renewal, investment and hosting capacity. On 24 November 2023, the government confirmed that report was complete and had settled on a precise capital cost: $2.716 billion on a P90 basis, meaning planners judged there was a 90 per cent chance the true cost would not exceed that figure. The plan called for full demolition, three new pedestrian bridges linking the stadium to Cross River Rail and Brisbane Metro, and roughly 880 new apartments in the surrounding precinct. A construction tender was expected to go to market in the second half of 2023, with construction running four years from 2026 to be ready for the Games.
The strongest case
Both the original plan and the backflip had a real logic behind them
The case for rebuilding the Gabba was not frivolous. The ground's public-facing charm concealed a stadium that, by the government's own account, needed major work regardless of the Olympics: ageing structure, accessibility that fell short of modern standards, and building-code issues that any responsible owner would eventually have to fix. Folding that inevitable spend into an eleven-year Games build, and using it to anchor housing and transport upgrades for a precinct that badly needed both, was a defensible way to get more than a stadium out of the money. A single, purpose-built school campus with new facilities was, on paper, a reasonable trade for families losing a heritage site their children had outgrown decades earlier.
The case for scrapping it, thirteen months on, is just as real. Public and media pressure over the cost blowout from about $1 billion in 2021 to $2.7 billion in 2023 was intense enough that the government commissioned an independent Sport Venue Review Panel — led by former Brisbane Lord Mayor Graham Quirk, alongside Ken Kanofski and Michelle Morris — to test the plan against rival options. The panel ran a 60-day process, took more than 900 public submissions, held around 130 stakeholder meetings and made 28 site visits before reporting to government in March 2024. Its verdict was blunt: even a full rebuild costing close to $3 billion would not deliver an international-standard, tier-one stadium, because the Gabba's site was physically too small to design around, whatever money was spent on it. Abandoning a plan once an independent, evidence-based review concludes it cannot deliver what was promised, rather than pressing on to protect a prior announcement, is what a government open to correction is supposed to do. It is also, without irony, close to what critics of the original Gabba plan had been arguing for a year.
What the record shows
The clearest official account of the Gabba as a capital project sits in two places: the Project Validation Report that fixed its cost at $2.716 billion in November 2023, and the Queensland Audit Office's Major projects 2023 report (Report 7: 2023–24), which tracked the Gabba alongside the state's other big infrastructure builds and flagged that it intended to test the project's validation report and business case against the government's own Project Assessment Framework in a future audit. That promised scrutiny arrived after the project itself had already been cancelled. A year later, the Auditor-General's broader Preparing for the Brisbane Games report, tabled 13 December 2024, found that no single Queensland Government document consolidated the full cost of delivering the Games — a finding that applies as much to what the state spent chasing an abandoned Gabba rebuild as to anything that came after it.
The cost of changing course
No public Queensland Government document puts a figure on what the Gabba rebuild cost the state before it was cancelled on 18 March 2024, when Premier Steven Miles publicly released the Quirk review and confirmed the Gabba would not be rebuilt. A full Project Validation Report, market engagement ahead of a construction tender, detailed design work and a parallel school-relocation master plan for East Brisbane State School do not appear for free, yet the Auditor-General's own finding — that no single ledger captures the true cost of Queensland's Games preparation — means taxpayers cannot see what that specific thirteen months cost against what it delivered, which in the end was nothing built. That is not a minor bookkeeping gap. It is the difference between a government that can show its work and one that is asking to be trusted on the strength of its intentions.
The human cost is easier to see than the financial one, even without a dollar figure attached. East Brisbane State School's community spent thirteen months planning for a move they did not choose, watching a promise of "state-of-the-art" facilities and a pool shrink to "new and refurbished" buildings before the entire relocation was abandoned. Parents and citizens' representatives spent that period attending consultation sessions, lodging objections and organising public campaigns to keep their heritage school on Wellington Road, effort that would not have been needed had the state tested the Gabba site's physical limits before, rather than after, committing to a demolition date for the school next door. The Brisbane School of Distance Education, itself not party to any Olympic announcement, was displaced from its Coorparoo site purely as a flow-on effect of a plan for a stadium several kilometres away. Neither community asked for the disruption, and neither received compensation for the uncertainty; the reward for both, in the end, was simply that the move was called off.
There is also a harder truth the "the Gabba was saved" framing skates past. The stadium's reprieve in March 2024 was not permanent. Once the Games' main venue shifted to a new stadium at Victoria Park — the decision Queensland ultimately reached under the Crisafulli government in March 2025, after its own further review of the options the Quirk panel had tested — the Gabba's long-term future changed anyway. The state has since progressed a Gabba Entertainment and Housing Precinct on the same site: on 9 October 2025, the Crisafulli government approved an amended Woolloongabba Priority Development Area scheme to fast-track up to 16,000 homes (approx.) around a new indoor arena, on the basis that the existing Gabba stadium will be decommissioned once the Games have moved to their new home. The heritage-listed school next door keeps its site. The stadium itself does not. Two governments, two plans and one demolition that was deferred rather than cancelled — that is a more accurate description of what "saving the Gabba" turned out to mean than the phrase itself suggests.
The Gabba rebuild was cancelled to spare the ground — but the ground is still scheduled to come down, just later, under a different plan, for a different reason.
The risk to the future
A state that keeps re-opening settled questions has less room to get the next one wrong
The Gabba saga is not an isolated planning error; it is the opening act of a pattern that carried straight into the fight over Victoria Park, where the main stadium's site and cost were tested and reversed twice more before the Crisafulli government's March 2025 decision. Each reversal has been defensible taken alone, usually on the strength of new evidence from an independent review. Taken together, they describe a state that has spent more of the eleven-year run-up to 2032 deciding where to build than actually building. With roughly six years left to deliver the venues that are now locked in, and with the Auditor-General still waiting on the consolidated whole-of-Games budget it asked for in December 2024, Queensland has less room than it once did to reopen a settled decision.
The lesson for whatever comes next is not that governments should never change course; the Gabba review process shows that changing course on good evidence is sometimes the right call. The lesson is that the state has not yet built the habit of pricing a reversal before making it, or publishing that price afterwards. The next community asked to plan around a Games announcement — whether a school, a small business or a residents' group — deserves more certainty than East Brisbane State School's families were given between February 2023 and March 2024, and a public account of what changing course actually costs, not just an assurance that it was worth it.