The IOC’s New Norm was meant to end Olympic overbuilding. Yet Brisbane 2032 is now an outlier with seven new venues, weakened climate language, and a revealing glimpse of how soft Olympic oversight really works.
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A simple comparison of Olympic host cities tells a revealing story. Since the International Olympic Committee (IOC) introduced its New Norm in 2018, host cities have been expected to do less of what gave the Olympics such a bad name: fewer new venues, less public debt, fewer white elephants, more reuse, more temporary infrastructure, and more sober thinking about what remains after the flame goes out.
“Brisbane is the outlier the New Norm was supposed to prevent.”
Paris 2024 built one major new venue: the aquatics centre. Los Angeles 2028 will again use the LA Memorial Coliseum, a venue opened in 1923 that has already hosted the Games in 1932 and 1984. Milano Cortina 2026, the French Alps 2030 and Utah 2034 all rely heavily on existing winter sport infrastructure. Brisbane 2032, by contrast, is now planning seven new venues. That does not make Brisbane bold. It makes Brisbane the outlier that the New Norm was supposed to prevent.
This is no longer just a local argument about one stadium, one aquatic centre, or one park. It is a test of whether the IOC’s reform agenda has any real force when a host city drifts away from the principles that helped sell the Games to the public in the first place. As my colleagues and I have argued in recent comparative research on Olympic sustainability from Turin 2006 to Brisbane 2032, the gap between Olympic sustainability rhetoric and implementation is not an anomaly. It is a recurring feature of how the Games are planned, justified, and delivered.
Brisbane was awarded the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games on the promise of doing things differently. The pitch was restrained, regional, sustainable, and pragmatic: use existing venues, minimise new construction, align with long-term public benefit, and deliver the world’s first “climate positive” Games.
That promise has since been progressively diluted. The “climate positive” requirement has disappeared from the Olympic Host Contract and has been replaced with weaker language about “aiming” to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than the Games emit. New major venues are now being advanced despite the embodied carbon, land clearing, construction impacts, and long-term maintenance burdens they bring. Public communication continues to lean heavily on the language of legacy, sustainability, and opportunity, even as the delivery model moves in the opposite direction.
The credibility of the climate accounting now matters enormously. If Brisbane is building more than originally proposed, the public deserves to know how the carbon cost of that construction will be measured, disclosed, and judged. That is where my recent exchange with the IOC becomes more revealing than they had intended.
The Brisbane 2032 climate action plan
Under item SIL (Sustainability, Impact and Legacy) 14 – Greenhouse Gas Inventory and Climate Action Plan – of the Olympic Host Contract under Operational Requirements, Brisbane 2032 must establish a baseline greenhouse gas inventory covering direct and indirect emissions, using the IOC’s Carbon Footprint Methodology. It must also publish a Climate Action Plan setting out emissions reduction, carbon removal, monitoring, adaptation measures, and revised emissions figures. Crucially, both documents must be submitted to the IOC for final comments and approval before publication.
So, I asked the IOC Press Office whether the IOC’s reviews or assessments of host city Climate Action Plans are publicly available. The draft response – inadvertently sent with internal edits and comments still visible – initially said: “No, these are not published.” That sentence was replaced with a more polished formulation: “We do not comment on internal exchanges relating to the review of draft plans.” But the internal comment left behind was more candid: “as far as I know, these reviews have never been public, tbh, sometimes we push back, and the OCOG (Organising Committees for the Olympic Games) ignores us.”
This is more than a media office mishap. It is a rare glimpse behind the curtain.
The public is asked to trust that Olympic sustainability commitments are reviewed, assessed and approved. Yet the IOC’s own internal comment suggests these reviews are not made public, and that even when the IOC pushes back, host organising committees may ignore it.
That one accidental moment of institutional candour captures the larger problem with Olympic governance. The IOC establishes principles. Host cities invoke those principles. Governments use them to build public confidence. But when plans change, commitments weaken, costs rise, or sustainability claims become harder to substantiate, accountability becomes harder to find.
This is the Olympic playbook of soft governance.
The Olympic playbook of soft governance
The Olympic Host Contract creates the impression of firm IOC oversight. They speak of sustainability, legacy, venue reuse and climate responsibility. Yet, their practical force depends on enforcement, transparency, and consequences for non-compliance. Without real teeth, “requirements” risk becoming aspirations dressed in contractual language.
“Without real teeth, ‘requirements’ risk becoming aspirations dressed in contractual language.”
Brisbane’s retreat from climate positive language shows how this works. A defining commitment that helped secure political and public support can be amended, softened, and reframed without much public scrutiny. The Climate Action Plan may eventually be published, but the IOC’s review comments, benchmarks, concerns, and objections may not be. If the public cannot see what was assessed, what was rejected, what was watered down, or what was ignored, then “approval” becomes a black box.
The same pattern applies to the New Norm. The IOC can say it favours reuse. It can promote lower cost, lower impact Games. It can celebrate a new era of Olympic restraint. But if Brisbane proceeds with seven new venues, what happens? Is there a penalty? A public warning? A requirement to justify each deviation? A published IOC assessment? Or does the machinery simply roll on?
So far, the answer appears to be the machinery rolls on.
At the local level, the consequences are not abstract. The urgency of Olympic delivery is increasingly being used to normalise exceptional governance: fast-tracked decisions, compressed timelines, centralised authority, and reduced scrutiny. In Queensland, enacted legislative arrangements linked to fast-track Games delivery have suspended, bypassed or weakened ordinary planning, environmental and heritage safeguards. Public consultation is maintained in form, but too often diminished in substance.
This is where “engagement theatre” becomes more than a planning buzzword. It describes a democratic problem. Communities may be invited to comment, attend sessions, complete surveys, and respond to glossy plans, but the key decisions have often already been made between politicians and corporate vested interests. The model becomes familiar: DAD – decide, announce, defend.
The artist impressions do their part to bamboozle the public. Renderings of Olympic infrastructure present a seamless future: green, airy, benign and inevitable. Mature trees frame vast buildings. Crowds flow effortlessly. The engineering difficulty, construction footprint, carbon cost, environmental damage, security requirements and opportunity costs vanish from view.
But the more important bedazzlement is not visual. It is institutional. The public is bedazzled by promises of legacy, global prestige, and once-in-a-generation transformation. Meanwhile, the ordinary questions of democratic governance become harder to ask: who decides, who benefits, who pays, and who carries the risk?
Those questions matter because mega-events concentrate public spending, accelerate planning decisions and create enormous opportunities for private gain. They compress the normal time available for scrutiny and make dissent look like obstruction. This is fertile ground for what economists Dr Cameron Murray and Professor Paul Frijters call the “game of mates”: a system of informal, often legal, but deeply unequal and unethical exchanges in which well-connected corporate actors benefit from public decisions.
In the Olympic context, these advantages do not need to resemble the crude “brown paper bag” corruption associated with Queensland’s Joh Bjelke-Petersen era. The playbook of the corporate stranglehold on our politics, the media, and democracy has become far more sophisticated, ubiquitous, protected, and hypernormalised. It can take the form of rezoning decisions, infrastructure commitments, procurement contracts, land transfers, regulatory exemptions, and insider access. They are often mundane, bureaucratic, and perfectly legal. That is precisely what makes them powerful.
The property sector is the clearest example. Planning decisions create enormous value. A new venue, transport link, precinct plan or village can reshape land markets overnight. Public investment can increase private asset values. Public land can become development opportunity. Public risk can become private value uplift.
“Mega-events create conditions in which public interest can be subordinated to delivery urgency, political optics and the interests of those best positioned to benefit.”
This is why the current Brisbane 2032 trajectory deserves scrutiny beyond sport. Seven new venues are not just seven construction projects. There are seven points where public money, land, infrastructure, planning power, and private opportunity intersect. The concern is not that every actor involved is behaving improperly. The concern is structural.
“Mega-events create conditions in which public interest can be subordinated to delivery urgency, political optics and the interests of those best positioned to benefit”.
State capture works in this way. It does not always announce itself with scandal. It operates through influence, access, lobbying, revolving doors, donations, procurement ecosystems, and media narratives. It gradually aligns institutions with narrow interests while continuing to speak the language of public good.
Brisbane 2032 was supposed to show that the Olympics had changed. It was meant to be leaner, greener, more accountable, and more aligned with the long-term needs of the host region. Instead, it is beginning to look like an old Olympic problem in New Norm clothing.
There is still time to change course. But a credible reset cannot rely on disclosure alone. Transparency matters, but publishing another plan, inventory or review will not materially change Brisbane 2032 unless scrutiny is tied to real consequences for non-compliance.
The test should be simple: if a new venue cannot be justified under the New Norm, it should not proceed. If a sustainability commitment cannot survive contact with the venue plan, the venue plan should change – not the commitment. If public engagement cannot influence the outcome, it should not be used to legitimise decisions already made. Most importantly, Brisbane should return to the principle that won the Games: use what we already have, build only what we truly need, and leave behind assets the public can afford, use and be proud of.
A grown-up, future-facing city in a heating climate does not look at its largest remaining inner-city parkland and think: “You know what this needs? More concrete, more traffic, more demolition, and a shiny render with suspiciously mature trees photoshopped back in.”
“Some cities mature by learning what not to sacrifice.”
And yes, Brisbane should not be frozen in time. But neither should every generation mistake construction for progress. Some cities mature by learning what not to sacrifice.
Queensland does not need an Olympics that proves the New Norm is toothless. It needs one that proves restraint, reuse, and democratic accountability are still possible – with enforceable consequences when those principles are ignored.
I have contributed an extended version of this argument to Games Watchdog 2032’s latest Plan B Report. The report sets out a lower-risk alternative for Brisbane 2032: one that returns to existing venues, fiscal responsibility, and the public interest.