Both the state government and the Brisbane City Council are encouraging the university and the gambling powerhouse to strike a deal which would help inject life back into an ailing end of the Central Business District.

The prospect was first raised by InQueensland in February and negotiations have continued below the surface since then.

Griffith is the only one of the three Brisbane universities to not have a CBD presence although its music and film schools have a substantial footprint just across the river in Southbank.

Star needs a property sale to help reinforce its balance sheet which is depleted by the weight of fines it has worn for breaching its licence rules in NSW and Queensland and the heavy cost overruns on the Queen’s Wharf casino and hotel complex which is finally due to open this weekend.

Star is still under close watch from the regulators and is facing penalties of hundreds of millions of dollars for alleged breaches of money laundering laws identified by the federal agency Austrac.

The magnificent Treasury building, bound by George, Queen, William and Elizabeth streets, was the seat of government in Victorian times and continued to be the home of Treasury until the 1980s.

If its walls had ears, they would tell many stories of Queensland’s growth from a remote colony at the edge of an empire to a diverse economy fuelled by minerals and agriculture.

In my view, the Goss Government made an error of judgement in the early 90s by selling it for conversion to a casino. It would have been far better retained in a use reflecting our history and memorialising the efforts of the colonial pioneers who directed scarce taxpayer dollars to buildings that would endure. We have few enough of them, after all.

The original Queen’s Wharf planning had the building hosting high-quality retail outlets for both locals and the planeloads of Chinese tourists expected to fly in. But that plan collapsed, as did a later plan to sell it to another developer for similar use.

It’s now been on the market for more than a year and quickly caught the attention of Griffith which has hungered for a CBD presence for several years.

It’s unclear exactly how Griffith would use the former Treasury. But the CBD is a good place for a business school. And the proximity to the Queen’s Wharf hotel and casino also make it a good place for a hospitality school. Both are part of Griffith’s current offering.

The southern end of the CBD has been stymied for years now by the blocks of construction taken up by Queen’s Wharf and simultaneous desertion of many government buildings by public servants and their bosses relocated to the “Tower of Power” at 1 William St.

The recent closure of the Myer store has left a large retail centre (once the hub of CBD shopping) largely vacant and the “vibe” around QUT at the opposite end of George Street has diminished since Covid licensed more students to stay home and do their classes online.

The addition of a university campus to the city would bring back more students of varying ages – and with them the energy our CBD sorely needs.

Much hope is invested in how Queen’s Wharf will impact on the city. It will be a striking building but its promise has been diminished by the attention given to its operator’s industrial scale hosting of criminal activity and the disruption associated with the sheer time it has taken to build.

Coming months will show us whether the end of construction, the opening of a string of restaurants and bars (plus the gambling floors) and the ability to use a bridge which we could see but not cross until the pokies were in place will capture enough local and tourist traffic to justify the billions in investment.

The repurposing of the old Treasury for the public good of education would be a side benefit, one well worth having.