Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Honourable Speaker, it gives me little pleasure to rise on this matter of public importance, honesty in politics. I, too, want to frame my contribution around the stadium because this stadium is a development that has been built on deceit since day one. On that day, as Cassy O’Connor was signing a tri‑partisan agreement to support the Tassie Devils team – which we do, strongly – the Premier, Jeremy Rockliff, looked her in the eye and said, ‘Cassy, a stadium will not be part of this bid.’ That is evidence because it remains in black and white on the AFL’s website today in a story that the AAP wrote in August 2022. The headline for that story, and I quote, ‘Premier confirms new stadium won’t be part of Tassie’s AFL bid.’ And the leader on the story, again I quote, says, ‘Tasmania confirms their formal proposal for the league’s 19th licence won’t include a new stadium ahead of a vote this month.’
Built on deceit. The Premier has been telling people for a long time, before the May 2023 AFL deal that a stadium wasn’t part of the bid. Yet, when that deal was inked – a dud deal, I might say – it has the stadium in it. Not just that, it’s a stadium in a specific location, of a specific size, of a specific design with a roof. What other entity? What other organisation? What other self‑respecting person allows the AFL to dictate exactly where we should build one of the biggest infrastructure projects that this state has ever seen? What happened here was, the AFL tried to pick a winner and then the Planning Commission has done its work and revealed the fact that that site is unsuitable for a stadium.
Fast‑forward to 2024, on day one of an election campaign, the Premier announced the $375 million and ‘not one red cent more.’ Clearly, a strategy to try to neutralise the issue in the election campaign context, promising that private public partnerships would pick up the balance. However, we have had blowouts since then, repeated blowouts – $715 million turned into $775 million turned into $945 million and then, literally on the day the Planning Commission releases its report, there’s a confession that it is now $1.13 billion, and private public partnership has been ruled out.
The original borrowings that are still written into the business case and literally was tabled in this House on the 1 June 2023, says that the government will spend $375 million and the remaining $85 million will be funded through borrowings – $85 million. We know how much the borrowings are now. The borrowings for Macquarie Point Development Corporation alone are $490.7 million. The information that the Treasurer has given us in relation to that is that it’ll cost us up to $32 million a year from the general government sector to service that debt, to pay that debt.
That’ll probably go up, because in the last week or two we’ve had our credit rating downgraded. That means the cost of money becomes more expensive ‑ so the $490 million for Macquarie Point and, indeed, the $375 million that the government will need to borrow to contribute has just got more expensive. When we talk about this so‑called new cap of $875 million, it’s already blown. It’s already blown because if you add in the cost of servicing the debt that we have to borrow, we have well and truly over $875 million already.
When abandoning the private/public partnership process, the Premier said ‘borrowings are not part of capital’. However, in Estimates last week, Treasurer Mr Abetz directly contradicted the Premier by saying borrowings are clearly going to be part of the capital input into this project. The spin and deceit of the government has been exposed by his own Treasurer.
When it comes to the assessment process, it’s utterly disappointing to hear the Premier, over the years, denigrate the Tasmanian Planning Commission and say that they went into this process with a preconceived position. In terms of ongoing deceit, I just want to highlight the fact that the Planning Commission, when it comes to the Cenotaph, was unequivocal in relation to the impacts of this stadium on the Cenotaph. Yet in this flimsy document the government has released that reruns all the lost arguments, the government says the significance of the Cenotaph is respected. Well, that’s not the view of the RSL, because they said that they have been disrespected at every turn.
Time expired.
