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Brisbane will be home of Australian rugby sevens as part of a significant Ballymore upgrade, which the Queensland government has touted as a major coup against New South Wales.
The development would bring the stadium’s capacity to about 8000, with the famous XXXX Hill maintained to the north of the ground.
But Premier David Crisafulli said the prize for Queensland was luring the Australian rugby sevens program from Sydney to Brisbane – and, with it, about 100 jobs.
The sevens teams will join Australia’s national women’s team, the Wallaroos, being based out of Ballymore. In addition, the Rugby Australia Awards would be held Queensland twice over the next seven years.
“Unashamedly, this is a raid,” Crisafulli said.
“We are looking across the country, we’re looking across the globe. We are bringing things to Queensland, and ahead of 2032, it is a golden opportunity.”
The “Teams In Gold” facility will feature an integrated 2400-seat grandstand, replacing the condemned eastern stand built in the early 1990s, with a high-performance centre included.
The previously announced Anzac Day Bledisloe Cup Tests at Suncorp Stadium formed part of the deal to bring permanently base the teams in Brisbane, Crisafulli said.
“Hosting those three Anzac Day Bledisloes across ’27, ‘29 and ’31 is something that will become part of the DNA of this state, this country and the world,” he said.
“It’s just a great nod to the Anzacs as well as that shared spirit of what is a remarkably high-profile contest.”
Queensland Rugby chief executive David Hanham said he expected the demolition of the eastern stand to begin before the end of the year.
“We’d be working towards after the LA Games [in 2028] for the players to be moving into this facility, and that segues back into opportunities like the Women’s Rugby World Cup, which is here in 2029,” he said.
Crisafulli would not put a price tag on the development to encourage competitive bidding, he said, but it would be funded through the Games Legacy Fund, which had been redirected in part from the former Labor government’s plans for a First Nations cultural centre.
The premier said there would be more Games Legacy Fund announcements in the coming months, for a variety of sports.
“You’ll see the generational infrastructure – everything from grassroots through to Suncorp [Stadium] and projects like this as well,” Crisafulli said.
“It’s also about the content. Part of this deal is also getting some really, really good content that I think Queenslanders and Australians will benefit from.”
The announcement came as Football Queensland, which has a participation rate orders of magnitude greater than rugby union, faces homelessness after Logan City Council moved to explore ways to evict the organisation from its Meakin Park base.
Football Queensland had hoped to build its own high-performance and community facility on the site, while at the same time Brisbane Roar has been squeezed out of Suncorp Stadium for the majority of its upcoming A-League season, due to event congestion.
Sports Minister Tim Mander said work was happening behind the scenes to address those issues.
“We acknowledge and appreciate how many young people play football in Queensland, and we are in constant conversations as well with Football Queensland about the exact issue you’ve raised,” he said.
“We want them to have some legacy. We want them to have facilities that are suitable for them and for the hundreds of thousands of kids that play football, so those conversations are continuing.”
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