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Thousands of athletes from around the world should have been arriving in Victoria and preparing to compete in shiny new venues in the regions from Tuesday.
Instead, taxpayers spent almost $600 million cancelling the Commonwealth Games, and regional Victorians are awaiting the $2 billion worth of social housing and sporting infrastructure pledged as compensation.
By June last year, at least, only 10 per cent of the promised regional housing budget had been spent on construction. And fewer new homes will be built than promised.
Sport clubs in and around Morwell, Bendigo, Ballarat, Geelong and Shepparton have been celebrating progress on their new facilities.
But in Miners Rest, on the north-western fringe of Ballarat in the marginal seat of Ripon, the government has walked back its promise to the community.
The event was supposed to provide a $3 billion boost to the state economy. The business case, which was later trashed but which always projected the Games could cost more than they were worth, put the tourism benefits above $500 million.
Glasgow has taken the Games up for July instead, making the most of the reparations Victoria paid to Commonwealth Games organisations.
At a July 2023 press conference, then-premier Daniel Andrews and his successor, Jacinta Allan, who was the minister responsible for delivering the Games, announced they were abandoning the 12-day event because of an explosion in costs. They said the price tag had soared from $2.6 billion to at least $6 billion.
The regions would still get all the promised benefits and more, they said.
“There will be at least 1300 new homes constructed across regional Victoria,” Andrews told journalists huddled behind state parliament that July.
But this $1 billion promise has since weakened to 1300 “new and upgraded” social homes. By June 30 last year, only $91.5 million had been spent on construction. The government hopes to have spent another $420.3 million by the time June 30 comes around this year.
To date, 401 new homes are finished or under construction. Another 187 are being refurbished.
While Andrews said cancelling the Games meant there was no longer a rush to deliver the sports facilities, in 2023 the government had still touted the promises were “for 2026”.
“We are getting on and ensuring regional Victoria still receives the housing, tourism and sporting infrastructure benefits that would have been facilitated by the Commonwealth Games – and more,” a government spokeswoman said this week.
The Age has tracked their progress as Tuesday – which would have been the launch of the 12-day event – nears.
Morwell and surrounding towns neatly capture the story.
Moe Cricket Club secretary Ian Simpson was stoked with the upgrades to the club’s base at Ted Summerton Reserve, despite some disappointment at the cancellation of the Games early on.
“If the government can’t afford it, they can’t afford it. We’re probably in enough debt as it is,” Simpson said.
When The Age spoke to him in February, new turf was being rolled out and will be ready for the club’s return to the grounds by next season.
“It’s going fantastically,” Simpson said. “They’ve done a bang-up job.”
Latrobe Mayor Sharon Gibson said the sporting venue upgrades were being delivered by the council on the government’s behalf around Morwell, which were progressing well. They would all be on time and on budget, Gibson said.
“Housing is a different story.”
Vacant government land at 10 English Street in Morwell – spanning 4.4 hectares and slated for 72 social, affordable and private homes – still looks like vacant government land.
Development Victoria reckoned work would be done by early next year.
Ten minutes down the Princes Freeway, upgrades to the Morwell Gun Club are just about done – though not to the extent they were initially promised.
The club had had a site visit from organisers and bureaucrats on the Friday before the government cancelled the Games. “We walked away from the meeting feeling really positive,” club secretary Ken Balcombe said.
So it was disappointing to be blindsided four days later.
“That would have been an amazing opportunity for our club,” Balcombe said. “We just wanted to highlight our sport.”
Had the Games gone ahead, they would have added three Olympic trap shooting trenches and stations and a shooting curtain. Sport and Recreation Victoria tried to strip that back to one range but settled on two, which at least means the club can host competitions.
It’s frustrating not to get everything they were promised, but Balcombe is grateful for the investment, nonetheless.
Other work around Morwell should wrap at the Gippsland Regional Indoor Sports Stadium and Gippsland Sports and Entertainment Park by the year’s end.
This pattern is playing out across the state.
Bill Stolk, of the Ballarat Residents and Ratepayers Association, was sick of the city’s former saleyards sitting idle.
It should have been an athletes’ village by now, with up to 1800 beds. Then, at least part of the site was supposed to become social and affordable housing.
“Nobody quite knows what’s going to be happening with it,” Stolk said. “It’s a huge eyesore out there, just doing nothing.”
Stolk doesn’t have a strong view on whether it should become social housing or something else. “Just anything at all.”
The site is being remediated while Development Victoria works out what to build, possibly an “employment precinct and, in the longer term, new homes”.
Stolk was pleased, though, with progress on sports facilities upgraded around Ballarat.
Mars Stadium, which hosts the Western Bulldogs, will get another 5000 seats and extra change rooms by the end of this year, while the regional athletics centre will have new tracks.
But in Miners Rest, a new oval and sports pavilion with change rooms is in doubt.
In 2024, the Sport and Recreation Victoria website said the facility will be built and that details were soon to come. Years later, it is just “proposed”.
A source with knowledge of the commitment, unable to speak publicly, said the announcement was always haphazard and the necessary work had not been done to ensure the site was appropriate. It falls within an Aboriginal heritage overlay.
“It doesn’t mean the project won’t go ahead,” Allan said on Thursday. “We’ve had some challenges with that site that we have been working through. There is a planning process that is under way because we absolutely do intend to deliver the sporting infrastructure for that community.”
The government just can’t say by when, or what that will look like.
Labor gained Ripon at the 2022 election with a 3 per cent margin after preferences, but the seat is considered one of the most likely to fall to the Liberal Party this November.
The opposition wasted no time this week after being alerted by The Age to what it said was another broken promise.
“Well, here we are in early 2026 in an empty paddock because the Labor government makes big promises before an election and fails to deliver,” Opposition Leader Jess Wilson told journalists at the grassland.
Ballarat Mayor Tracey Hargreaves, avoiding questions about Miners Rest. She conceded that cancelling the Games was “extremely disappointing at the time”, but she said the council had moved on.
“Rather than dwelling on what didn’t occur, our focus is firmly on the positive outcomes now emerging for Ballarat,” she said.
Further south, inland from Geelong in Colac, the local council, local Liberal MP Richard Riordan and residents have been butting up against government plans to build 50 social homes at Pound Road.
Construction was due to begin by now, but that site also remains a vacant lot.
Colac Otway Shire Mayor Jason Schram, the Geelong Regional Alliance (G21) chair, agreed the area desperately needed more housing but said the state hadn’t heard local concerns about putting it all on the one site.
“We sat down in good faith and negotiated,” Schram says. “We thought they listened.”
But the council was overruled, and the 50 homes will be built by 2027 – or 2028.
Schram said Colac-Otway didn’t have any dedicated soccer pitches and questioned whether that should have been a higher priority than in neighbouring Armstrong Creek, a fast-growing new community that will get four indoor sports courts by the end of this year.
The investments may be worthwhile, but Schram doesn’t believe the legacy funding has been targeted fairly.
“They’re just trying to save face from the embarrassment of blowing the Commonwealth Games and more money,” he said.
In 2023, Andrews said the government hadn’t done any more cost-benefit analysis on the works after dropping the Games.
But they all stacked up, he said. That’s according to the business case, anyway.
“It’s hardly the greatest piece of work ever done,” Andrews had said, on another day, about that same document. “That’s very, very clear because the estimates are a long way from what the cost was going to be.”
Armstrong Creek had long suffered suggestions it was picked to host aquatics in a political calculation.
Olympic-grade swimming pools would have been built and then ripped up, had the Games gone ahead, only to be replaced by one smaller pool.
Andrews, in the weeks after abandoning the Games, insisted the rapidly growing community needed such facilities.
“You need community pools and aquatic centres in rapidly growing local communities,” he said. “Armstrong Creek is one of the fastest and biggest, brand-new communities anywhere in our country. And we made commitments around legacy benefits, and we’re delivering those legacy benefits.”
This was a more efficient way of delivering the community facilities, anyway.
But the City of Greater Geelong lobbied against getting an aquatic centre, which was then cut from the commitment. The city will get its indoor sports courts by the end of the year.
On the northern edge of Geelong, the hockey pavilion at Stead Park will be refreshed, with a new pitch and extra seating to be added.
The Waurn Ponds Sporting Complex is yet to show signs of becoming six indoor courts, a gymnastic facility and dance studio. But early construction work has begun and is due to be completed late next year.
Around Torquay, the Banyul-Warri Fields hockey pitch has been completed, while stage 2 of the Wurdi Baierr Aquatic and Recreation Centre is expected to be done by late this year.
The croquet club in Bendigo, meanwhile, anticipating their upgrades, moved out of their home last April. It wasn’t until February that work got under way, though the completion date for late this year has been held up.
President Phil DeAraugo says the club will have two full-sized competition courts for the first time to host tournaments. “The courts we had were pretty rough and ready,” he said.
It’s a similar story for the bowls club next door. Geoff Briggs says the club’s base “looks like a lunar landscape at the moment”, after a delayed start on four new greens.
Work was moving quickly now and was going to be “magnificent”, Briggs said, once it was done as planned by the end of this year.
The club, like most, was disappointed not to host the Commonwealth Games.
Ultimately, it’s a better outcome for them. The upgrade has been designed with the 154-year-old club in mind rather than for a brief competition on the world stage. They probably never would have got that government investment otherwise.
“I think we’ve come out of it very well,” Briggs said.
Bendigo Showgrounds and Bendigo Stadium refurbishments are also expected to be done this year.
In Shepparton, the BMX club has been remodelled to host international competitions. Mayor Shane Sali is stoked with further funding to upgrade a shared pathway and stadium.
“However, we do acknowledge that a regional Commonwealth Games concept would have been a great opportunity.”
This time four years ago, Labor was spruiking the Games and its benefits to the regions as a reason to get a rare third term. Plenty of regional cities got the legacies they were promised.
Now, the minister responsible for delivering the 2026 Commonwealth Games, Jacinta Allan, is coming up to another election having sold fool’s gold in Miners Rest.
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