Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Honourable Speaker, I rise in frustration and some despair on behalf of the constituents I represent to speak to this motion and proudly oppose the order of a stadium at Macquarie Point. Anyone would think from that performance from the Premier that bluff and bravado is going to build the houses that Tasmanians need, end the waiting list for healthcare, employ the child protection workers, because belief alone is not going to deliver those things for people.
The panel recommends that the project should not proceed – ‘This project should have died there.’ They are the words of the Tasmanian Planning Commission’s expert assessment panel, stood up by this parliament on the passage of an order introduced by that very Premier. Five experts across architecture, law, treasury, planning and administration, a year of assessment, millions of dollars, two community consultations, assessment guidelines, public hearings, a draft assessment report, and a final assessment report ‑ and an utterly unequivocal, unconditional rejection of the Mac Point stadium, and a crystal-clear recommendation: the stadium should not proceed; it should not be built.
This is despite the immense resources the government has thrown into the Macquarie Point Development Corporation to deliver this project and the focus – the overwhelming focus and refocus – of the public service into delivering this project. It should not pass this House. That is the recommendation of the Planning Commission. Really, this order should never have even been presented to this House, but such is the obsession and the acquiescence of the Premier and his government, no amount of expert advice, community opposition or fiscal madness has dissuaded the belief that it must be built because the AFL says so. Such is the complicity of the Labor Party, the abrogation of responsibility and absolute vacation of the job of opposition, that this order will pass this House.
The Premier’s bad decision is backed in. AFL gets a pyrrhic victory, the city is compromised and the Tasmanian budget, condemned to billions in debt and intergenerational inequity on an immense scale. For what? A third stadium. A third AFL stadium. A $5.4 million to 5.9 million better bottom line for the Tasmanian Devils Football Club, and a ‘build it and they will come’ economic belief that is rejected by every expert the government has commissioned and the evidence they have based their advice on. But a pyrrhic victory this would be, for the Premier, for Labor, for the Devils and for the AFL, should it be built.
What was once seen as a critical piece of enabling infrastructure to facilitate the Devils’ success has, over the two‑and‑a‑half years since that dud licence agreement was done, turned into a solid net negative. Be it the community opposition, be it the expert planning recommendation, the budget crisis, the impact on our city, the shafted stakeholders or the toxic constrained site that would lead to delays and cost blowouts that will make the TT‑Line fiasco seem like a minor innocuous misstep.
This stadium now represents an albatross around the neck of the Devils, and a stain on the approach of the AFL, a significant risk to its reputation, brand, and credibility as the steward of the national competition of our national game. This is corporate overreach writ large.
It was good to force the opportunity to present this perspective to the AFL last month. It took two letters, multiple follow up emails and the threat that we were turning up anyway; it was welcome to have the opportunity to join a delegation to AFL House and meet with the CEO to present this case, to present your case, to present the community’s case. Tasmania has two AFL‑grade stadiums where games have long been played. Tasmania has earned the right to a team. There is no national competition without Tasmania.
The stadium is no longer a net positive. It has morphed by mismanagement, cost, blowout and deaf ears into a corrosive, negative influence on the support for the teams. Of course we do support the teams. We Greens were signatories to the tripartite agreement in support of a Tasmanian team back when the Premier looked then‑leader, Cassy O’Connor, in the eyes and assured her that the team was not conditional on a stadium. It’s the same commitment the Premier made to the public.
To this day, there’s an August 2022 AAP story on the AFL’s website, detailing the deceit in both the headline and the lead:
Premier confirms new stadium won’t be part of Tassie’s AFL bid. Tasmania confirms their formal proposal for the league’s 19th licence won’t include a new stadium ahead of a vote this month.’
But of course, with the passage of time, a few short months later a stadium is central to the deal for a Tassie licence and history has shown that it was a negotiation point and a demand of the AFL since day one. Flawed from the start, the stadium was born from deceit and a dud licence deal that had no reference to Treasury, no reference to Cabinet and certainly no reference to the community. It had no social licence and nothing that has happened in the sorry three-year saga since has done anything to engender confidence or made progress in earning much-needed support. Quite the opposite.
Important stakeholders have been dismissed and disregarded. Under what other scenario is a stakeholder like the RSL, representing returned veterans and their families, so casually and consistently ignored. Since the start, the RSL has been a loud and proud defender of the values of the Cenotaph, the country’s oldest state war memorial, prominently located as a sombre reminder of the sacrifice of so many and long-protected by planning provisions so its sight lines and reverential ambience is maintained.
‘Disrespected at every turn,’ wrote RSL CEO, John Hardy, to the Premier mid last year, describing the platitudes the RSL received from the government and the Macquarie Point Development Corporation as the height of the stadium steadily grew and the sacred sight lines down the Derwent and across Sullivans Cove were designed away behind a roof mandated by a multi‑billion corporation. Site selection and design has been ‘carefully selected so that the sight lines run on each side of the structure rather than through the middle of the stadium,’ said the MPDC CEO. ‘The Macquarie Point Stadium site will never impact the views from the Cenotaph to the setting or rising sun, views up and down the Derwent, or across to the eastern shore.’
This was demonstrably not true then, and definitely not true now, as confirmed by the planning commission in its expert assessment. It wrote:
The built form of the stadium will have a significant detrimental effect on the visual amenity of the Cenotaph and the way it is understood and experienced. The height, form, bulk and proximity of the stadium building will cause it to be highly intrusive and physically dominating against the Cenotaph monument and surrounding landscape, and will diminish the prominence and primacy of the monument. The location of the Cenotaph was specifically chosen for its conspicuous position. The impacts on the views will negatively affect the cultural significance of the place, as well as the status of the monument.
I could go on ‑ as has the RSL’s campaign to protect their sacred place, confirmed again this year in its annual congress. An overwhelming majority of RSL sub-branches opposed the stadium and are looking to us elected representatives to stop it. More accurately, given the complicity of Labor, they’re looking to the independents in the Legislative Council to stand up for proper process and good decision making, and accept the planning commission’s recommendation that the stadium not be approved.
Just yesterday Legislative Councillors received correspondence from new RSL State President, Mike Gallagher[OK], with a view unchanged since day one:
The evidence is clear, the Cenotaph’s visual prominence, contemplative atmosphere and national symbolism would be permanently diminished. RSL Tasmania urges you to exercise your independence in full, to consider not only the present debate but the legacy your decision will leave for future generations. The cenotaph stands as Tasmania’s most sacred place of remembrance. It deserves nothing less than your unwavering protection.
I remind members that protection has been enshrined in planning rules for decades. The statutory planning scheme, developed over years with consideration and consultation, has long imposed height limits on the Macquarie Point site explicitly to protect the heritage, character and important values of Sullivans Cove and the Cenotaph. This is a key reason we held concerns about the Project of State Significance process. As acknowledged by the panel in its report, the POSS turns off all existing planning rules, and essentially gives complete discretion to the panel to recommend a course of action irrespective.
Even with this freedom, and with the political pressure sitting behind this project, such are the impacts of the stadium, it has received resounding refusal and a clear recommendation that it should not be built by the experts we, in this Chamber, engaged. No‑one should believe the government’s desperate argument that this is an industrial wasteland that will remain so should this project not proceed. Macquarie Point is one of the country’s premier brownfield sites and this stadium proposal is the true Tasmanian tragedy. Of all our many land-use conflicts, and the Premier has spoken of some, over the decades: dams, development, logging, cable cars, fish farms, canal developments and the pulp mill. No‑one disagrees that this site should be developed. It’s a huge opportunity for something special, but the stadium is not it.
Previously agreed with the development master plan for genuine multi-purpose renewal, product of years of torturous consultation and release to much fanfare and celebration of economic and employment stimulus. A true mix of residential, commercial, science and open space, centred on a groundbreaking truth and reconciliation park, the previous master plan was so complete that the government began contracting out elements for construction. Opportunity lost, where previously we had the Palawa and their stories central to the site, a first for a capital city and a big opportunity to tell our truth in a genuine and meaningful way, we now have a second-rate concourse built for mass ingress and egress and cynically titled the Aboriginal Culturally Informed Zone. It’s not even funded as part of this build.
Where once the government offered prominence, it now tenders platitudes described by Palawa Professor Greg Lehman as gestures that he would ‘characterise as a typical example of what is commonly called black cladding’. Shame. That is a shame. That is an appalling accusation to be subject to. By turning celebration to condemnation is not only the backward step taken in the rush to ditch the agreed master plan for a third AFL stadium. In fact, we, the taxpayer, paid a Melbourne property developer $1.6 million not to proceed with the housing development this government had contracted them to deliver. How is that? The Treasurer still claims that without the stadium, the site will stay vacant land. That is simply not the case. I read from the planning commission’s report:
It is noted that the precinct plan has not been subject to any statutory process by which it could be included in the planning scheme. If the project does not proceed, the existing reset site development plan will remain in place and provide for a much higher level of development and activation.
That’s what the planning commission says. Years of planning and agreed vision and millions of dollars were thrown out simply to start again with the stadium ordered by the AFL, on that site, of this size, with a roof – a requirement no other team had to meet to join the competition. It’s a lose-lose for the city and for the state.
We lose genuine urban renewal. Such is the size of the stadium and unsuitability of the site that the planning commission finds genuine activation of the site outside of event days will be impossible to achieve:
The panel considers that the project will not support or promote integrated urban renewal of the Mac Point site … The project faces inwards on the site, in isolation from the wider city, and it does not readily enable permanent activation of spaces or meaningful connections with the surrounding areas and waterfront.
Compare the numbers: look at the sheer floor area of the various development categories under the previous versus the stadium development master plans. Data doesn’t lie:
- Education and research: 50,000 square metres previously; 7000 square metres now.
- Commercial, retail and hotel: 60,000 square metres previously; 10,000 square metres now.
- Residential: 15,000 square metres previously, nothing now on the actual Mac Point site.
- In total, 125,000 square metres of usable floor space previously; 17,000 now under a stadium scenario.
The reality is that, outside of event days, what is being approved today is a dead zone, a monolith that will sever connections between the city and the Domain, obscure the Cenotaph, and dominate the cityscape for decades to come. Housing is but an afterthought, an add-on as a condition of federal funding and identified for waterfront land, not part of the site, remote from services and now proposed in a spot to be severed from the city by a monumental white elephant.
This brings me to the budget. Since this project was first proposed, we have seen four budget blowouts, and no-one really expects it to stop there: $715 million, $775 million. $945 million. Then, on the day the planning commission released its report, thanks to the generosity of the Premier, along with a superficial rejection of its findings, he announced another cost blowout to $1.13 billion. That’s not even including enabling infrastructure or the future cost blowouts, which will come.
Macquarie Point is a constrained, reclaimed and contaminated site that was largely rehabilitated to accommodate the previous development master plan. Inherent in these characteristics is risk: risk of delay, which equals risk of cost escalation. Treasury has advised that the risks are real. In the Pre-Election Financial Outlook, Treasury staff, unfettered from the oversight and spin of the Treasurer, warned of cost uncertainty, saying:
The actual cost of construction of the stadium will not be known until the project is put to tender. A range of issues could further impact on the cost of the stadium, including a tight construction market, the bespoke nature of the roof design, the cost of related projects to support the stadium.
There’s also the fact that the stadium proposal is still only 70 per cent designed. The planning commission put the cost of the stadium, in terms of accumulated debt over the next decade, at $1.8 billion, and that is at the previous cost estimate of $945 million. I note Mr Willie’s contribution in relation to debt, which was seemingly ignorant of the evidence presented by the planning commission that this project would add almost $2 billion of debt to our books, at a time when Labor rails against debt.
Just a week after the Budget was delivered and ahead of an even worse one in May, this kind of expenditure is simply untenable. Tasmania will have to borrow just to service the debt racked up to build this stadium. The state will borrow $375 million for capital investment and pay tens of millions each year simply to service that borrowing. Despite promising to provide it to the crossbench panel, an exact figure has not been delivered. Despite their ‘not one red cent more’ commitment, the promise of a public-private partnership and the state of the Budget, we will borrow hundreds of millions of dollars more to throw at the project. There will be $490.7 million borrowed by the Macquarie Point Development Corporation, costing the taxpayer over $30 million every single year across the forward years to service the mountainous debt. More, assuming borrowings will blow out as construction costs climb. That’s tens of millions of dollars each year that need to be borrowed simply to service debt we rack up to construct this catastrophe. With no credible plan to pay off the debt, it will dog us for the life of the project.
All this at a time of austerity, as the Treasurer sends letters to community service organisations asking them to volunteer cuts while a Trump-style efficiency unit is stood up to find cuts in the public service, when teachers are refused a pay rise and the housing waitlist grows longer. We will borrow to pay for the borrowings to build a third AFL stadium.
Tasmania has some of the worst health outcomes, lowest literacy rates and most chronic housing crisis of any state in the country. Child safety is underfunded and community gardens are closing. In the face of this, with the Treasurer on a savings bee, the stadium would condemn generations of Tasmanians with the annual burden of borrowing tens of millions more each year just to pay for it.
We know that this year’s Budget is just the start. This year’s Budget and the Treasurer’s approach foreshadow even harsher measures in the years to come, as borrowings really kick in and the interest payments escalate. With rising debt and no ability to pay it, the credit rating agencies are watching closely and seem poised to downgrade us for good. Last year, both S&P and Moody’s placed Tasmania on a negative watch, down from ‘stable’, pending budget outcomes and debt declarations. If we are downgraded, the cost of capital goes up and this whole shocking show becomes more expensive again.
No-one should believe the government’s promise of new stadium-led nirvana. No-one has advised them it will be so; not Nicholas Gruen, not the Tasmanian Planning Commission and not its own Treasury. This government makes a virtue out of ignoring expert advice and makes explicit policy choices that will make things worse. This stadium will make things worse. It will deepen the budget crisis, destroy important values and compromise the city. It has divided our community and it will cost us dearly. It has already cost us dearly.
The evidence is clear. As elected representatives, it’s incumbent upon us to consider the facts, weigh up their credibility and make decisions based on data, on expert advice and on evidence, not on emotion and bravado. The experts have spoken. Let us compare the pair: the planning commission report versus a flimsy PR pamphlet written by the government to justify their position, prosecuting the same arguments that were heard by the planning commission, the same ones that were heard by the community; the same ones the planning commission rejected in its recommendation that the project should not proceed. If I were an MLC sitting on the fence seeking answers, I’d be offended. Back this report over this pamphlet. It’s a complete joke.
I acknowledge the community we represent and will continue to fight this stadium.
Time expired.
