Brisbane City
Australia's fastest-growing capital with a $100B infrastructure pipeline — the 2032 Olympics as niche construction, purchasing global relevance for a resource-dependent third city.
Brisbane has a $100 billion infrastructure pipeline — including the 2032 Olympics, Cross River Rail, and a 224-hectare port expansion — that is less about hosting a sporting event than about purchasing global relevance for Australia's third city. Greater Brisbane's 2.8 million people make it Australia's fastest-growing capital over the past decade, driven by interstate migration from Sydney and Melbourne (lower house prices, better weather) and overseas arrivals attracted by the resource-sector jobs that radiate from Queensland's coal, LNG, and mineral exports.
KPMG estimates the 2032 Olympics alone will deliver A$8.1 billion in direct economic benefits and create 91,600 jobs over 20 years. But the Olympic investment is the visible fraction. The Queensland Big Build commits A$89 billion across the state, with almost two-thirds spent outside Greater Brisbane — a deliberate strategy to distribute growth to regional centres like Townsville, Cairns, and Toowoomba.
KPMG estimates the 2032 Olympics alone will deliver A$8.1 billion in direct economic benefits and create 91,600 jobs over 20 years.
What appears to be organic growth is substantially engineered. The city's modern economy rests on a geological accident: Queensland sits on coal reserves that made Australia one of the world's largest exporters, and the Curtis Island LNG plants near Gladstone process coal seam gas extracted across the Surat and Bowen Basins. Brisbane is the administrative, financial, and logistics hub through which this resource wealth flows.
Mining companies don't headquarter in the coal fields; they headquarter in Brisbane's CBD, creating a services economy that looks diversified but remains resource-dependent at its root. The 2032 Olympics function as niche construction: the event creates infrastructure that reshapes the city's competitive position, attracting population and investment that persist long after the closing ceremony. Sydney's 2000 Olympics transformed its western suburbs; Brisbane is betting on the same mechanism.
The biological parallel is coral spawning — a mass reproductive event triggered by specific environmental conditions (in Brisbane's case, the IOC vote) that releases enormous biological energy in a concentrated burst, establishing new colonies across a wide area. The A$7.1 billion venue program spreads across five regions, seeding infrastructure nodes designed to capture growth for decades.