Ms ROSOL (Bass) – Honourable Deputy Speaker, I rise to speak on the situation we find ourselves in with the stadium. Yesterday, the TPC released its stadium draft integrated assessment report and it is damning. It unequivocally demonstrates that this stadium will be terrible for our state. It runs through a range of assessment criteria used to look at the stadium and identify whether it will be good or bad, whether it will work and how it stacks up. Across all of those criteria, the stadium does not stack up.
We know it will leave the state in further debt. The Premier likes to talk a lot about the benefits this stadium will bring to the state and how it will be so wonderful for the people of Tasmania and yet, in this report we see that when they look at the social and the health and wellbeing aspects of the stadium, it does not do very much for Tasmania at all.
We have the Premier and the government constantly claiming the stadium will be a great benefit, despite the fact that it will plunge us into debt and that debt will stretch long into the future.
The report goes into the detail of the stadium, but I want to step back a little bit and look at the bigger picture of what is happening in our state because while we focus on all the details of things and the ins and outs and of the different aspects of the stadium, life goes on in our state across the whole range of different parts and aspects of people’s lives.
I cannot tell you how many people contact my office across the different portfolios I hold to tell me their stories of how difficult their lives are, the problems they are having accessing services, the healthcare that they are missing out on. I cannot tell you all of the data and all of the figures that we look at in the Greens and see the gaping holes in our state with the services that we have.
While we have a government willing to plunge our state into debt and to plunge more and more money into this stadium, we also have a state that is struggling and people are suffering and they are missing out.
When it comes to health, we know that wait times are growing ever longer. Our emergency departments have the longest wait times for treatment in the country. Ambulance wait times are long. Outpatient appointment wait times are long. People constantly contact me to say they cannot get the gastroscopies they need in a timely manner. They are having to wait 18 months for essential cardiac procedures. We know that there are glaucoma patients who are having their appointment times stretched further out.
People are missing out on healthcare because this government is cutting funding to services. We have just seen in an RTI that the Greens obtained, that in our prisons there have been more than 6000 lockdowns in an almost 12-month period and lockdowns have been greater than 16,000 hours due to staffing issues.
This is a result of government mismanagement of the corrections service. It is a result of not investing enough into our prison system. It is about not valuing staff. It is about not valuing people. We say we have a corrections and rehabilitation department, but there is no rehabilitation that I have heard of that is happening in our prisons. We are under investing in our corrections and prison service.
What about children? The children of Tasmania are going through difficult times. Children who are in out of home care are not being seen by case managers within the time frames that they should. Families are in crisis. The advice and referral line has lengthy times.
Community services do not have the money to provide the services that they need. I am constantly hearing about the lack of funding, the lack of certainty for the future. If we want to talk about the stadium, let us talk about the context of it in this state where we have great need for the people of Tasmania and instead of listening to that, paying attention to that and doing something about it, we are wilfully turning away from the people and funnelling money into a project that is going to put us into debt for the long future.
It is an absolute travesty that this government remain committed to this stadium despite this report and the Greens call on the government to take action and dump the stadium.
Time expired.
