In this episode, Nat & Anna discuss the Brisbane 2032 Olympic Games, and why being a host city is, overwhelmingly, a bad thing for the city and a worse thing for a city's poorer and more marginalised inhabitants. We draw on John Rennie Short's idea of "event capture" to look at the ways hosting a mega-event redirects urban processes (further!) away from more just modes of planning and transformation, the ways mega-events drive further dispossession of First Nations Peoples and displace poorer residents, and the ways even fairly limited checks and balances around social and environmental protections, and transparency and accountability in the planning and governance system get dodged, or overriden. All in service of an event that will cost billions and that will not even break even.

This episode kicks off a new investigative series for us - the NOlympics Committee - digging into the extensive evidence base for why hosting the Olympics is bad for cities. We'll be exploring the history and politics of the Olympics, the narratives that are used to justify and legitimise this kind of public spending, and the relationship between these kinds of mega-events and other forms of oppression, dispossession and exploitation.