Victoria Park consultation has closed, and a second deadline next door runs to 9 October

Victoria Park at Herston is council owned parkland today. Consultation on the draft Victoria Park Precinct Legacy Plan, the formal chance to tell the Queensland Government what it should become, closed at 5pm on Sunday 27 September 2026. The plan puts a new oval stadium with capacity for 63,000 spectators, and up to 70,000 for concerts, on that ground. The Victoria Park stadium Brisbane ends up with will outlast the Games by decades. In legacy mode it hosts AFL and cricket, with the Brisbane Lions, the Brisbane Heat and the Queensland Bulls based there. Its future owner is Stadiums Queensland.

What the draft plan actually puts on the table

The Government released the draft on Sunday 2 August 2026 and opened consultation the following day, 3 August 2026. Alongside the stadium sits a new National Aquatic Centre at Spring Hill, which can expand to up to 25,000 seats for the Games using temporary stands and then settles back to a permanent 8,000. The precinct also pulls in upgrades to the Brisbane Showgrounds.

The Government says approximately two thirds of Victoria Park will remain green public space. The draft sets out a public amphitheatre, footbridges, a community sports hub with an athletics track, an expanded York’s Hollow wetland and forest trails. Those are the pieces a household in Sunnybank or Kuraby would actually use.

How the consultation on the Victoria Park stadium Brisbane plan ran

The Have Your Say page ran the consultation in two parts. The second took feedback on specific locations inside the precinct through an interactive map, so a comment could be pinned to a particular path, entrance or stretch of grass. That page was the published channel, and no email or postal address for this consultation was published.

Simon Crooks is Chief Executive Officer of the Games Independent Infrastructure and Coordination Authority, the body running the venue program. His emphasis, in a GIICA item published on 3 August 2026, fell on access rather than on the seating bowl. He said, “How people move to, from and around our venues is just as important as their experience once they’re inside them.” For families out at Springfield Lakes, Kallangur or Browns Plains, that is the sentence worth testing, because getting to and from Herston is the part that lands on people who live nowhere near the ground. The authority’s published line is 1800 021 023.

Brisbane Stadium is also the furthest advanced of the lot, and the only one of the authority’s 17 venues showing an early works phase on its own venue tracker. That phase runs 2025 to 2027, with planning and approvals across 2025 to 2026 and design in 2026.

A second deadline lands on 9 October

On Thursday 17 September 2026 the Deputy Premier, Jarrod Bleijie, announced amendments to the Bowen Hills Priority Development Area that fast track about 4,000 additional homes, taking the area to approximately 27,000 across its life once the 23,000 already planned are counted. The amendments lift height limits from 30 storeys to 50 in parts of the Mixed Use Zone, inside a priority development area of 108 hectares next to Victoria Park. Public notification opened that day and runs to Friday 9 October 2026. Economic Development Queensland publishes the Bowen Hills project detail and is the contact point for the area on 07 3452 7880.

Bleijie, who is also Minister for State Development, Infrastructure and Planning, rests his case on what has already happened at Woolloongabba. His statement says similar changes to the Woolloongabba Priority Development Area produced a 466 per cent increase in housing related development applications in less than 12 months.

One window has closed, and one is still open

For most readers of this masthead, Victoria Park has been somewhere on the far side of town. The households who filed a submission will be quoted back at everybody else for the next decade, when the athletics track is programmed, when the footbridges are costed, and when someone decides whether a family from Marsden can reach a Lions game without a car.

The park consultation closed at 5pm on 27 September. Submissions on the homes going up beside it are open to 9 October. Both windows fall while the stadium is already in early works, which means the design is being drawn now rather than after the consultation reports are written. A submission takes less time than the drive to Herston, and it is the only part of this a renter in Woodridge or a first home buyer in Ripley gets to control.