‘Couldn’t organise a conference for 500’: event expert on Games chaos
The Victorian government’s team in charge of delivering the 2026 Commonwealth Games was so inexperienced it would have struggled to host a 500-person conference, an inquiry has been told.
Event Pty Ltd director Simon Thewlis said one of the primary causes of the Games’ failure was that it was being organised by “generalist public servants” rather than specialists. He also panned the reliance of state government “super departments” on outsourcing work to consultancy firms.
Events industry heavyweight Simon Thewlis has slammed the organisational structure of the Victoria’s ill-fated Commonwealth Games, saying it was “always going to end in tears”. Eamon Gallagher
Mr Thewlis said he believed the Games would always “end in tears” given its business case was based on the 2018 Gold Coast Games but was intended to be held in five regional hubs across Victoria.
“At the end of the day, a bunch of people with little to no real operational major event experience tried to organise one of the largest events our country has ever seen,” he told an inquiry on Monday.
“This is a story of astonishing arrogance and hubris that has seen Victoria going from having once been a leading event state to one responsible for the biggest debacle in the history of events in Australia.
“They thought they knew better than the event industry. They failed completely. I would go as far as saying had the project been a conference for 500 people, they still would have been in trouble.”
Mr Thewlis, who has worked in the Victorian event industry for 40 years and co-founded the lockdown-era Save Victorian Events campaign, said leading public servants in the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions “decided they were the best people in Australia to run the
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