Sometime in the early 2030s, a child who is seven years old today will walk into a stadium in Brisbane wearing green and gold. The decade between now and then has already been named for the occasion, the "green and gold decade", and every level of Australian sport is being asked what it will do with it.
Most of the answers will be domestic, and rightly so: facilities, participation, pathways, coaching. But an Olympic and Paralympic Games hosted in Queensland is, by geography alone, a Pacific event. Suva is closer to Brisbane than Perth is. When the world's athletes arrive in 2032, our nearest neighbours won't be watching a distant spectacle; they'll be watching the biggest sporting event ever held in their own neighbourhood.
Legacy is decided early
The awkward truth about mega-event legacies is that they are largely determined before the opening ceremony. The infrastructure gets built either way; what varies is whether the surrounding decade is used to widen the base of the pyramid or merely to polish its peak.
Widening the base in Australia means junior sport, school sport, community clubs. Widening it in our region means something even more elementary: equipment. Across much of the Pacific, the constraint on youth sport is not enthusiasm; it's gear. Anyone who has watched a barefoot rugby game on a Fijian village green can vouch for the enthusiasm. Balls wear out fast on gravel and coral sand, and replacing them competes with school fees and groceries.
Suva is closer to Brisbane than Perth is.
A legacy you can post
This is a solvable problem, and solving it is astonishingly cheap by the standards of Olympic budgets. A single corporate hospitality package costs more than equipping twenty Pacific schools for a year. If even a sliver of the green and gold decade's energy, corporate or philanthropic, flows to grassroots equipment in the region, the 2032 legacy will include tens of thousands of children who got to play because Brisbane hosted the Games.
We've seen what this looks like up close. In 2025 our team delivered donated balls, boots and kits to schools and clubs across Fiji, with gear collected from Brisbane clubs whose juniors had outgrown it. The kids who received it will be teenagers when the flame is lit. Some of them, statistically, will be athletes. All of them will remember that the country hosting the Games was the country that turned up at their school with a bag of balls.
The decade is the point
DFAT's Sports Diplomacy Strategy 2032+ makes the regional framing explicit: the Games are not just an event to host but a relationship-building instrument for the whole Indo-Pacific. Strategy documents, though, don't inflate balls. The work of the green and gold decade will be done by clubs, companies, schools and volunteers deciding, one delivery at a time, that the Pacific is part of the home crowd.
That's the wager Kicks for Kids is making with the next six years. The stadiums will be ready by 2032. The question is whether the region's kids will be on the pitch by then too.