Australia’s Victoria state withdraws as host of 2026 Commonwealth Games

Australia’s Victoria state has withdrawn as host of the 2026 Commonwealth Games due to the cost of the event breaching estimates by around 5 billion Australian dollars.

State premier Daniel Andrews fronted media in Melbourne and said he was not prepared to spend up to 7 billion dollars (£3.6 billion) on a “12-day sporting event”.

He said: “Last year when the Commonwealth Games authorities approached us and needed someone to step in to host the 2026 Commonwealth Games, as a state we were happy to help out, but of course not at any price.

“I’ve made a lot of difficult decisions in this job, this is not one of them.

“It’s just quite obvious, we are not going to spend six to seven billion dollars on a 12-day sporting event.

“We don’t just make popular decisions, we do what’s right and it would simply be wrong.”

The original budget for the games was estimated to be around 2.6 billion dollars (£1.3 billion) but ballooned out to nearly triple that.

Mr Andrews said they have had “cordiale discussions” with the Commonwealth authorities in London and will continue discussions with them on Tuesday morning.

He added: “It is not appropriate and it is against the interest of taxpayers for me to speculate and conduct a negotiation with people on the other side of the world at a press conference here today.

“In the meantime we are going to let our team that are in London work through these issues.”

Mr Andrews said the estimates were “clearly under the actual cost”.

The Victorian state government are instead going to use the money budgeted to improve sporting complexes and housing in regional Victoria.

The 2026 Commonwealth Games were set to be held in regional Victoria across towns like Geelong, Bendigo, Ballarat, Gippsland and Shepparton.