Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, this morning in question time, the Premier referred to comments I made regarding planned infrastructure spending in the upcoming state budget. He described me and, through me, the Greens, as being anti-school buildings, anti-roads and anti upgrading hospitals. I want to take this opportunity to correct the record.
The Greens are pro-infrastructure that benefits and supports the funding across the forward Estimates of infrastructure builds and the jobs that these provide, where these are prioritised first in Tasmania, with our limited budget, into areas of social disadvantage. We support the building of homes and schools, and ambulances and hospitals. We support the maintaining and upgrading of existing infrastructure, the climate resilience and the ruggedising of bridges and roads and other public facilities.
We recently saw another year of poor NAPLAN results for Tasmanian students. Obviously, we need school infrastructure so that students can better learn in classrooms that are the right size and in playgrounds that are excellent. Of course, we need to have hospital infrastructure like a Royal Hobart Hospital that is fit for purpose. Unlike the Liberals, the Greens support the hospital staff who are aghast to hear that the Liberals are downgrading the long-promised expansion to the emergency department there with a cheap, substandard version that will not even be enough to meet the pressures on the badly overcrowded space there today, let alone enough to plan for the future increases ahead.
The Greens support infrastructure spending that is directed to build affordable homes for Tasmanians desperately in need. It is a housing crisis. There are some 4500 people waiting for homes on the public housing list. Hundreds of people spend their night on the streets, or in cars with their children. The government should make a serious budgetary commitment and a focus on building the public and social housing that we need, which can be done if there is a will.
What we do not support is the Rockliff Government spending money on infrastructure that puts the interests of corporations and their desires ahead of everyday Tasmanians. The Liberals have committed a billion-dollar stadium at Macquarie Point that Tasmanians overwhelmingly do not want and do not need. The $715 million that they say will be required to build a covered stadium on that challenging site is preposterous and treats Tasmanians like fools for pretending that it is even possible.
We know the costs are going to blow out dramatically. In the Australian Capital Territory, for example, they are looking at retrofitting or building a new stadium. The retrofit costs have come in at $1.2 million and it is not even a covered stadium. Building a new one is coming in at just under $3 billion. We have seen cost blowouts on the Spirit presided over by this government. Their failure to support to secure port infrastructure in a timely manner will mean it will cost Tasmania’s hundreds of millions of dollars.
In light of these infrastructure failures and the cost blowouts, you would think the government would reconsider ploughing ahead with a billion‑dollar plus stadium and put needy Tasmanians first. All the staff and the energy and the time of the highly paid consultants which are going into the Macquarie Point stadium project could be used instead to scrap the efficiency dividend that the Treasurer is proposing – $300 million that is taking jobs today out of critical services. The vacancy control committees that are taking, stealthily and steadily, jobs out of hospitals, schools, child safety protection workers and the police. There is nowhere that is immune under the Liberals and their cruel austerity budget.
They could instead fully staff the healthcare system. They could staff the people who are on strike now because they care about the conditions that are not there for mothers who are expecting to birth at the maternity ward; they care about the fact that radiology is not being provided in a timely fashion or that forensic science is being done in a woefully substandard way because of the lack of funding.
We could provide Tasmanians with essential services – real cost‑of‑living measures like free public transport and free public schools. People would expect that to be the case, but it is not the case. If you are struggling with paying a budget, the cost of getting your child to a school really makes a difference. We could, of course, be doing something real like building 1000 homes a year.
It can be done. It can be done if there is a will. It can be done if the focus is not blindly being put onto a stadium, onto the interests and the whims of a corporation, for example, like the AFL, who clicks their fingers. It is at the expense of everyday Tasmanians. The Greens are proud to stand with the striking workers and with the majority of Tasmanians who implore the Treasurer and the government to actually listen to the advice of Saul Eslake; listen to the needs and demands of striking workers; and listen to their constituents who are ringing them up because they cannot get a bed, because they are sleeping in a car with their kids, because they are desperate.
This is an opportunity to not continue with a broken business‑as‑usual model. It is the broken model being used around Australia by governments that are hanging onto the idea of austerity budgets and hanging onto the idea that if you pump prime corporate sectors, somehow the money is going to trickle down and end up with jobs for nurses and teachers.
It just does not. It has been proven as a failure, but we need is that same pipeline of jobs. Of course we do, but it can be done if you are directing them into building homes and directing them into actually expanding the Royal Hobart Hospital in the way that has been promised for nearly a decade now. It is unbelievable that the government does not understand that this is not the sort of infrastructure that Tasmanians want to be their priority, and a billion-dollar stadium is the top of that list.
