"You need to look at what goes on, you need to plan, you need to reform, that’s exactly what our team have done. “When you plan, you plan to be successful, but you also understand that sometimes you need plan Bs and you need to respond.” Mr Peters said delays were "a reality in major events" such as the Commonwealth Games. “We react as fast as we can to every situation that’s put in front of us because we want people to get to the venues safely and get away from the venues safely,” he said. “A lot of people there last night were inconvenienced in some way, but they went away with one great thing: they had a fantastic time.”

Brisbane local Susan Beevers said it took her and her husband more than two hours to get home, despite staying about 12 kilometres from the Carrara venue. She said they had followed advice and opted for public transport to get to the ceremony from her parents’ home at Nobby Beach but was left unimpressed after being herded “like cattle” to waiting buses. “What we could see was they were loading one bus at a time,” she said. “After about a good three-quarters of an hour the police got involved and they were loading two, three, four buses at a time. “By the end, they were trying to load five or six at a time ... we were all trying to get out of this one tiny gate and we don’t understand why there was literally only one entrance to get onto the buses.

“There would have been 10,000 people trying to get through.” She was also among the hundreds of commuters left waiting more than an hour to get to the ceremony from Broadbeach South station earlier that night. She said between 5.05pm and 6.15pm, no buses passed through the bus station. “They didn’t deploy buses for a good hour and there was a lady who was talking to her son who had caught the train down from Brisbane and was at Nerang station,” she said. “All the buses were at Nerang station and there were no people so they had obviously over-compensated that way.

“He got down from Brisbane faster than we got there from the Gold Coast.” On Thursday, Transport Minister Mark Bailey apologised to commuters who were left waiting before the Games opening ceremony. "We did experience some issues at Broadbeach south, where some people had to wait longer than we would have preferred," he said. “I’m absolutely upfront and apologise to those people who were caught in that situation, and we were managing that in real time from the Transport Coordination Centre. “Every day is going to be different."

LNP member for Mudgeeraba Ros Bates said it was the "end of the line" for Mr Bailey, calling for him to be sacked, coming after other transport-related issues under his watch. "My heart goes out to all of the people who were stuck waiting for buses," she said. "I've had local residents tell me that to get to the opening ceremony last night it was 10 hours - three hours for the ceremony and seven hours in travel from Reedy Creek." Ms Beevers has tickets to an athletics event next Saturday and said she would “wait and see” whether she would catch public transport.