'Bizarre': Chris O'Keefe reacts to artist impression of a redeveloped Queensland Sport and Aquatic Centre for 2032 Olympics 08:56

Ah, just two sleeps away from the Olympics in Paris. And you know it's going to be a fantastic event. You can see the facilities are just top-notch. And how could it not be in the City of Love? Well, in four years' time, too, we'll have the Los Angeles Olympics, and we know the Yanks go big when it comes to big events. And no-one does big events better than Los Angeles. It's the home of Hollywood. And then four years after that, where are we going? Briz Vegas! Ha-ha-ha!

What do we know so far about the Brisbane Olympics? Right now, there is no plan for where the opening ceremony will be held or where the athletics will be held. None. They don't know where. There is no main stadium yet. We don't know where the athletics will take place or where the opening ceremony of the Brisbane 2032 Games are going to be held. That is extraordinarily, extraordinarily embarrassing.

We've got a new slogan, though. So Brisbane's 2032 president, he's the president of the Olympic Games here in Australia, right? His name's Andrew Laveris. He's a big flying, sort of big shot CEO. And he's revealed, well, we don't know where the events are going to be taking place, but we've got a new marketing slogan. You ready? Do you like it, ladies and gentlemen? Shine brightest together. Wow. I wonder how much they paid for that. I wonder what marketing team or...

marketing company was paid millions and millions of dollars to come up with shine brightest together maybe come up with a place to hold the opening ceremony

And you've got to see... I'll put this render up on the website, 2GB.com, but you've got to see the render of the mooted stadium called CUSAC. So it's the Queensland Sport and Athletic Centre. It's also known as the QE2, or the old ANZ Stadium. They played there, the Brisbane Broncos, when Lang Park or Suncorp Stadium was being redeveloped. So you'll know it well. Anyway, it's just an old athletics track. And there's this bizarre plan to redo it and make it the main stadium. And seriously...

Have a look at it, 2GB.com, because it looks like A.S. Marks on Anzac Parade. All the old showgrounds at the Easter show. Emily, one of our producers, said, Brookvale overlooks better than that. Well, our colleague and good friend, Neil Breen, he's the authority when it comes to the Olympics and certainly the Brisbane Olympics. He's on the line for us. Breeny, g'day. Hello, Chris.

A.S. Marks, do you reckon it's better than Duke? Well, it's almost better. It's almost better. Chris, I could talk all day about the Brisbane Olympics. The listeners will know that I spent three years up there recently on 4BC. So I was there through the whole thing, Brisbane winning the bid and

And then the whole kerfuffle afterwards. And the story of the Brisbane Olympics is that 10 years ago, the Lord Mayors of South East Queensland got together to make a play for the Olympics

Not, yeah, yeah, get the event, but as an infrastructure play, the population's exploding. We need roads, rail, more airport runways, all sorts of things that will support an Olympic Games. Now, I'll say, oh, that's fallen by the wayside because none of that's happening.

And what we've got three years on since we were told by Thomas Bach, the president of the IOC, Brisbane's got the Olympics, is the whole thing's been bogged down in politics and it's a farce. So Brisbane got the games because the IOC had this new austerity measure. They didn't want any more Rios or Athens where there were dead stadiums and people did their backsides financially. And so it was all about, oh, we need to find a place that will use existing stadiums

and have an olympics there no one wanted to do it because we had tokyo poor old tokyo sort of lost their games to cover but they still had them then there's paris and there's la and john coates wanted australia to have another olympics so what he does he gets john o'neill the former boss of the australian rugby union the chairman of star casinos who's fallen by the wayside get

Gets him to facilitate a meeting with himself and Thomas Bach and Anastasia Palaszczuk, the former Queensland Premier, who's not keen on the Olympics, right? Let's have a meeting. They convince Palaszczuk to go for the Olympics. She goes for it, believing it'll win her 10 years more worth of governance in Queensland because the public will go crazy.

And then they come up with this Olympics that was going to cost five billion US dollars and revenue, sorry, five billion Australian dollars, three and a half billion US with revenues of five billion exactly matched to the dollar. And that they were going to spend, get this Chris, 750 million Australian dollars total on venues.

$750 million. Yes, yes. And that was the document that was given to the world in Tokyo. Well, of course, Queensland, Brisbane gets the games and the government quickly realises, hang on a second, the original proposition was opening ceremony at a Dunup Sun Corp and the athletics at Carrara on the Gold Coast where the 2018 Commonwealth Games athletics were.

Then Palaszczuk says, no, I'm going to do the GABA, knock down, rebuild the billion dollars. And we found out recently that that was just written down on a piece of paper. There was no feasibility study. Then they realised it would cost two and a half billion. Then Scott Morrison supported the Olympics because he needed votes in Queensland ahead of that election. But the new Albanese government wasn't that keen. So they said, we don't want to touch the GABA because they lost all those seats to the Greens in and around that area. I know this sounds so complicated, right?

But that's what's happened. And they've ended up with, OK, we'll get a feasibility study done. We'll get rid of the Gabba. Stephen Miles, when he became Premier, let's go to Victoria Park, this feasibility study said, which is near the city and build a 60,000-seat stadium with the roof. Then he says, no, we won't do that. We're going to do up Kiwi 2. And that's the model that you've seen now, this done-up Kiwi 2. There's no swimming venue. There's no athletics venue, unless that gets...

There's no sign off on upgrades. There's nothing, Chris. So we don't know where we're swimming. We don't know where we're running. We don't know where we're opening the Olympics. And then you've got this Andrew Laveris in Paris at the moment declaring Brisbane is not a hillbilly town. Well, you could have fooled me.

And he says it's ahead of schedule. It's not ahead of anything. Like, seriously, Chris, it's really, really embarrassing. And I'm surprised. See, the IOC, here they are in Paris now. Okay, I turned on a current affair last couple of nights.

And there's Ali Langdon and there's the Arc de Triomphe and here's the, you know, Eiffel Tower and look at the Palace de Versailles where they're going to have the equestrian. Well, Brisbane's going to have the equestrian at the showgrounds and they've got that written down as an existing venue. Now, the Brisbane showgrounds has got two grandstands, Chris.

Now, Don Bradman famously made his test debut at that ground, the showground in Brisbane, and the two grandstands were built before he made his debut. Mate, you can't make it up, mate. You know, so what Albanese did was he said...

We want to cap our expenditure. We don't want to, you know, cost blowout to the CFMEU, hold us to ransom. We're not going to touch anything we do with the Gabba. We will build this thing called Brisbane Live, which will host the swimming and then become a concert venue in the Brisbane CBD, 18,000 seats. So they said, we're going to build it on a suspension level above the Roma Street rail station, right? Then they worked out, well, hang on, if you did that, it would probably cost $4 or $5 billion. So they've scrapped that.

That's gone. Well, when are we going to get a plan? Because obviously we've got a Queensland election. Before I let you go, Bernie, we've got a Queensland election in a couple of months' time. When are we going to get a plan? And is it just up to Chris Afuli, the LNP leader in Queensland, who's likely to win in a landslide? Is it just a matter of him saying, you know what, we've got the things now. We can't embarrass ourselves.

That's what's got to happen. So that election's in October. Both sides of politics agree to put the Olympics on the shelf until after that election because it's so on the nose. The people of Queensland don't want it, mate. I'm telling you, Chris, they don't want the Olympic Games. That's why the whole thing's turned into a kerfuffle.

So what they'll do is, Christopher Lee, he'll probably win that election. He's just going to then have to say, I'm sorry, Queensland, but we're going to have to spend big money. Otherwise, the world's going to look at us after LA and Paris and go, wow, what a debacle that was. Hey, the other thing is, don't forget the Olympics in Brisbane are on in July. It's winter. That's not too bad in Queensland. Oh, yeah, but it's not great. That's about all that's going good in Queensland at the moment. Good on you, Brady. I'll let you go.

Anyway, I'm fired up, Chris. You can tell. Appreciate that. That's Neil Breen.