Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, this morning I asked the Premier some serious questions about the conduct of the Coordinator‑General in providing what he asserted was his opinion piece on the Macquarie Point stadium. This situation is emblematic of everything that’s murky about the stadium and the way the government has mismanaged the process, the lies, the trickery, spin and at-all-costs mentality about how the government would push and has pushed the stadium project.
We now know from an ABC right-to-information request that, far from being his own work, the Coordinator‑General had direct input from the Tasmania Devils CMO and the Master Builders Association in writing the op‑ed. The Greens are not the only ones to raise questions about this. The Public Accounts Committee asked the Coordinator‑General whether the Premier or minister was aware of it beforehand. His response was:
I wrote the piece. I sought some input from people outside of government, not inside of government. I presented the analysis, not the opinion piece, but the analysis to the minister and the Premier beforehand, but not an opinion piece.
In response to a further question on notice, he subsequently said:
I subsequently directly emailed the Premier, Treasurer and Premier’s Chief of Staff on 10 October 2025 and attached a copy of my opinion piece as a heads up of what was being provided to the media.
However, the RTI documents show that the Premier’s Chief of Staff and DPAC’s Deputy Secretary were provided a draft of the Coordinator‑General’s op-ed two days earlier on 8 October. Not a final draft, not just a heads up, but a working draft with markups and track changes. The Premier’s office, the government media office, Ms McCann from the Devils and Ms Cairney from the Master Builders Association also discussed the media strategy before releasing the op-ed with him.
Before the op-ed was released, DPAC also provided copies of the Coordinator‑General’s economic analysis to Cricket Tasmania, MPDC, Treasury and the Department of State Growth. A little bit more than a heads up. At no point in his appearance before PAC did the Coordinator‑General offer any of this information. Why all the secrecy? The documents released to the ABC under RTI also show the Deputy Secretary of DPAC apparently requested that the Coordinator‑General release his op-ed to coincide with the government’s response to the Tasmanian Planning Commission’s final report on the stadium. How useful for the government to have the fiction of their Coordinator‑General’s so‑called independent economic assessment to fall on when they are trying to spin a reason for totally ignoring the planning commission’s finding that the stadium’s economics were, and still are, cooked.
There are a lot of questions raised by these RTI documents. The Greens have concerns about what appears to be the direct involvement of the Premier’s office and staff in a body of work that falsely spun to Tasmanians as being the work of the Coordinator‑General alone. We’re concerned the Coordinator‑General did not appear to be truthful when he was asked about the role of the government’s involvement by the Public Accounts Committee and we’re concerned that the Premier apparently doesn’t seem to understand why a coordinator‑general being dishonest and pretending to have acted independently on this work is a problem. I invite the Premier to provide further information to the House about his understanding of the Coordinator‑General’s work and whether or not, when he apparently gave approval for the Coordinator‑General to publish an opinion piece, the Premier knew that the piece had direct input into it from the Tasmania Devils and the Master Builders Association.
Tasmanians have a right to expect truthfulness and, on the face of this, it’s more evidence of this government’s misuse of taxpayers’ money and State Service employees for their perverted and corrupted processes around the stadium.
