Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, I rise to put on the record today the fact that for decades the Greens have been part of a tri‑partisan united front with the Liberals and Labor to support Tasmania’s bid for a team of our own. Our history as football fanatics and devotees stands for itself. This island literally kicks above every other state in Australia.
The Greens made it crystal clear in the earliest conversations about a licence with the Liberal and Labor parties that our support for the licence would be contingent. It would not extend to building a new stadium infrastructure for the AFL in Tasmania. We already have more than earned the right to join the national league without billion dollar strings being attached. The Premier, Jeremy Rockliff, looked Cassy O’Connor in the eye and reassured her that our participation in the state’s bid was not contingent on a stadium. We now know that he was not being truthful. It was the start of the Premier’s long, sad descent into deception with Tasmanians about the costs and the deals that have been struck for this stadium.
The AFL has always said, as we found out later, that it was a prerequisite from day one. Today we will be voting on this stadium order that would never have come about if then‑premier Peter Gutwein hadn’t blinked and caved into Gil McLachlan’s demand to the smallest and poorest state in the country to hand over the sweetest spot in central Hobart to the AFL for their pleasure as a shiny money-making vanity project, with a retractable roof for novelty to boot.
The news went down like a stink bomb in the community and opposition immediately commenced, which continues to this day. The people watching in this Chamber are a tiny fragment. I know there are many more listening online. Our internationally award-winning author Richard Flanagan, along with Roland Browne and other doughty citizens, started a group in early 2023 called My Place. They released an alternative vision, activating the proposed stadium site, which the Liberals for a decade had failed to achieve or refused to do.
We could have had an internationally significant urban renewal project there already, including 1000 houses providing homes for 2000-3000 people, a nationally significant indigenous truth and reconciliation park, a new State Library, a tidal swimming pool, a light rail transit hub and so much more. The Greens support the $240 million in federal funding but it should be used as intended: not for a stadium but on housing as part of the alternative vision that’s been proposed.
When the Premier derides, as he did again this morning, that beautiful place at Macquarie Point, or what could be a beautiful place, as an industrial wasteland, he is denying his failure and that of the last 10 years of Liberal governments to do something. What he should have done is got out of the way of the community and let the community lead for a project that should be a palawa-led, community-led, supercharged social investment space. That is what we still can have on this beautiful place in central Hobart. The Greens will continue to fight for that to happen. There is a viable alternative to a stadium at Macquarie Point and it has a social licence. Building a third stadium clearly does not have that.
Three-and-a-half years later and the debate rages on. Poll after poll have confirmed that the stadium is massively on the nose among Tasmanians, especially among northerners. In February, two‑thirds of people who live in the north and north west were registered as opposing the stadium in a significant poll. They were evenly divided in the south but, overall, against a stadium. Another poll in June found around 70 per cent of all Tasmanians oppose it.
The My Place group has been growing exponentially over the years. It’s a tireless team of committed Tasmanians who continue to devote themselves, on their own time, to challenging the combined Liberal and AFL juggernauts that seek to destroy the values that so many Tasmanians hold dear. These people promote, as do the Greens, a genuine Aboriginal‑led truth and reconciliation space. They want to protect the unique Hobart heritage and arts precinct that is a source of tourist delight. They flock to see something which nowhere else in Australia has. They want to protect the Cenotaph’s visual sightlines and positioning in the landscape. It deserves the dignity of holding space for remembering and commemorating returned soldiers, a place forever to pay our respects to people who gave their lives in our service. These would all disappear or be irrevocably damaged if the stadium were to be built. \
I thank from the bottom of my heart, on behalf of the Greens, everyone in the My Place group, and all the other Tasmanians who have respectfully, intelligently and doggedly worked for years to help Tasmanians wade through the spin and deception of the Liberals, engaged with the government’s perverted planning processes, made representations and submissions to the planning commission and who stayed the distance because of their love for this place and their outrage at the injustice of it being taken away on the whim of the AFL bullies. It is people like you all that bind and enrich the fabric of Tasmania’s community, coming from a place of love and fairness, not self-interest, you epitomise the best of us.
By contrast, Premier Rockliff has covered himself and his party with shame for his behaviour over the stadium. He’s broken promises and has been repeatedly dishonest with Tasmanians about the true cost of the stadium. It’s grown from an estimated $715 million to $1.13 billion and rising. The Premier said the state would not be on the hook for one red cent more than $375 million and he said much more than that. He’s repeated himself on multiple occasions and what we know from his comments is that we can’t take anything the Premier says on the stadium to be the truth because he’s said it’s a good investment, it will be funded by the private sector, we will be investing $375 million and the rest will be coming from private resources. He also said in September that he’s happy to be held account when the time comes. Well, the time, Premier, is today. You have to listen to the truth and we are reflecting back to you the dishonesty you have been peddling for the last two years with Tasmanians and it is a shame and a stain on your leadership of this state.
He has done some worthy things, but the way he has presented the case for the stadium and the spin shows that he doesn’t actually have the conviction to believe it, because if he did he’d be utterly honest with Tasmanians about what it’s going to cost, and the costs have grown and the government has clearly abandoned the hope of private investment, so despite the stadium price tag already having skyrocketed to by an extra $400 million, the Premier continues to try and downplay the risk of cost overruns. He finally admitted in Question Time this morning that while $1.13 billion is the current estimate, he knows the cost of the project will increase further.
Most Tasmanians already know the stadium costs will keep blowing out and I want to refer to the interim Budget Papers that show the government is splitting the cost between $375 million that will be paid in this budget in the general government account and $490.7 million that will be taken as borrowings from the Macquarie Point Development Corporation within that state authority. It’s very clear that these costs will be borne by the state of Tasmania and we will be bearing the costs for paying down that debt for decades to come.
The Premier has dodged the planning schemes, contracted independent experts such as Nicholas Gruen to review the stadium and Saul Eslake to review the state’s finances and when both gentlemen found a dire economic outlook for Tasmania and exposed the stadium’s true costs, the government tried to hide the evidence to dismiss it and, worse, he has attacked and vilified the very people he employed to do the work. Attacking truth-tellers is form for this premier and this government. They don’t like the truth. Nicholas Gruen said the project was ‘already displaying the hallmarks of mismanagement’ then.
The Premier established the Project of State Significant process and the independent Planning Commission panel and then he’s rubbished the scope of their work, even though the government’s own Solicitor-General has thoroughly vindicated the panel’s decision to include the northern access road and and car park and other areas within the scope of what should be assessed for the stadium.
The Premier’s proponent, the Macquarie Point Development Corporation, has withheld information from the panel in an effort to a stymie their assessment work. The draft panel’s assessment report certainly looked damning for the prospects of the stadium’s future and at that point the Premier tried to smash up his own planning process and drafted special stadium-enabling legislation in an effort to ram it through parliament before the commission’s findings could be published.
The record stands that the Planning Commission was given an unexpected reprieve by the state election, and here we are today. Full credit to the Planning Commission, which stood firm on their legislature requirements and continued to work and provide us with a final draft assessment.
Their recommendation was, not surprisingly, withering. They recommended that the stadium should not proceed; it is a financial sinkhole that will diminish the economic welfare of Tasmanians as a whole. Far from being an architectural triumph, it is overbearing, unexceptional, too big for the site, and overall, negative for Tasmanians. The stadium has irrevocable and unacceptable adverse impacts on Hobart’s spatial and landscape character, its urban form, and our historic cultural heritage.
They found that the stadium will cost every Tasmanian who’s not on Commonwealth welfare benefits $5900. By comparison, they said that Sydney’s Allianz Stadium cost $273 for every New South Wales household. If we take this order on and pass this stadium, we would need to raise taxes of $50 million a year for the next 30 years, the Planning Commission says, or we would need to cut public services by the same amount to balance the books.
At 54 metres high, the stadium is not for sharing with anyone or anything. It would obliterate Constitution Dock and make a mockery of the Sullivans Cove Planning Scheme that has lovingly safeguarded the heritage of this tourist drawcard area. The Planning Commission found the form and scale of the stadium are a repudiation of the scheme’s longstanding principles and strategies.
The Planning Commission says it will extensively and irreparably damage the historic cultural heritage of Hunter Street, the Engineers Building and, most particularly, the Cenotaph. They said it would be a dominating backdrop to the buildings and the Cenotaph and would dwarf them, diminishing their spatial and visual importance.
I want to make mention, as I know the member for Clark, Mr Bayley, will do shortly as well, to the letter that was sent by the president of RSL Tasmania, Mike Gallagher, to all Legislative Councillors. He says:
The commission’s report finds the proposed development would cause significant and irreversible harm to the heritage values, setting and commemorative function of the Cenotaph. The Cenotaph’s visual prominence, contemplative atmosphere and national symbolism would be permanently diminished.
He also says:
No mitigation, the Planning Commission confirms, can offset the harm the proposed stadium would inflict on the Cenotaph. Once its setting and reverence are lost, they cannot be restored.
Those of us who stood there on Tuesday morning on Remembrance Day to pay our respects and remember the sacrifice of our servicemen and servicewomen who died for us could not avoid feeling the significance of standing in that place and thinking of today. I spoke to many people about what it would be like if the stadium were to be built that would be utterly dominating that landscape. It would be a shame.
The Planning Commission says the stadium would also drown the splendour and the beauty of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra’s concerts at their purpose-built Federation Concert Hall, right next to where the stadium would be.
I want to address the comments they made about Aboriginal heritage. The Macquarie Point area has a special significance for Tasmanian Aboriginal people. On the edge of Timtumili Mananya and under the gaze of great Kunanyi, it has been a traditional gathering place for eating and ceremony for countless generations before colonisation. The Macquarie Point Development Corporation has proposed to recognise the character of the landscape and Aboriginal cultural values, proposing an Aboriginal culturally informed zone, but the commission has found in their report that consultation with the Aboriginal community was wholly insufficient. Professor Gregory Lehman gave a submission to the commission and he said
The Macquarie Point Development Corporation has sought to generate a range of superficial outcomes to create an appearance of Aboriginal participation in the stadium project through a rushed process with little transparency. A statement of Country, a Palawa artwork and ad hoc input into the design framework of the stadium by a single individual stand in stark contrast to the accumulated engagement undertaken over seven years prior to the decision to allow a stadium to be built on the precinct. Instead, these gestures amount to what I would characterise as a typical example of what is commonly called black cladding. Aboriginal engagement and consultation has been inadequate and of poor quality. The AFL stadium at Macquarie Point offers minimal scope for reconciliation and healing, or for the celebration of Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural resilience and vitality in the face of genocidal colonial violence.
Nala Mansell, also from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Council, made a submission. She said:
The Government is proposing to build a billion-dollar stadium, a project that will not just dominate the nipaluna skyline but further erase the opportunity for Aboriginal land justice in the heart of the city. Macquarie Point is not a blank canvas as it’s been described. It’s a part of a living Aboriginal cultural landscape that holds generations of stories, history and trauma. It’s one of the few remaining spaces in this capital city where a real act of restitution could take place. We have been excluded from every formal decision-making process related to this stadium.
Shame. It is a shame. The government’s own business case shows a negative return on the investment. It is a loss-making venture, only 45 cents in every dollar that we would invest in it. Despite what they say, it’s not pro-business and development, it’s actually a loss-making commitment of public funds, just when we’re staring down the barrel of the worst debt burden ever in Tasmania’s history as a state courtesy of the Liberals budget mismanagement.
I thank the Treasury officials and the opportunity that a surprise snap election gave us to hear the unvarnished naked truth from Treasury officials in caretaker mode. Their Pre-Election Financial Outlook report – if anyone watching hasn’t looked at it – is well worth reading. I suggest Labor read it as well. Because if you do, you will understand that what they say is we cannot afford the time to wantonly take on more debt. It should only be critical infrastructure. They were very serious about the risk to Tasmania, the potential for serious downgrade of our credit rating. That has also been forewarned by the planning commission. Should this stadium go ahead, our credit rating would go down, in all likelihood, and that would mean we’d be paying more interest on the interest that we’re paying on our debt at the moment and any further interest that we wanted to take out through TASCORP would be at a higher interest rate, also more money that wouldn’t be going into public sector jobs, community sector services. The infrastructure displacement for the project is real. Every subsidised stadium dollar is a dollar that’s not available for home construction. Not having housing for more than 5000 desperate waiting-list applicants directly holds back people’s ability to contribute fully in society. It holds back the educational outcomes for children. The opportunity cost for the interest on the debt for decades to come is enormous. It will come, as the Treasurer has said, with deeper cuts to essential programs in next year’s budget.
If this blighted project were to proceed, it would drain business and other revenue from across each of our electorates. Members should think about that deeply. It will not increase opportunities within electorates. Victoria has realised that, rather than throw good money after bad, it could not afford the Commonwealth Games. That decision taken was recently vindicated by a Victorian parliamentary inquiry decision this April, which found that the decision taken to withdraw from that project, even though it came with significant costs at the time, was correct and the reasons they gave are almost identical to the ones being raised here about the proposed stadium. It is not too late to back out. It is much better in our state’s interests if we do so.
The Greens oppose the vast cost it would take to build the stadium, whatever the figure will finally, be. The design is not completed and no contract’s been locked in, so any home-builder would know from bidder experience that the price could easily go up by 50 per cent or more. There would be a fierce battle to attract a competent large infrastructure firm to do the work, given the flight to the north from companies wanting to cash in on the Brisbane Commonwealth Games dollars. Given what’s known, the stadium would at minimum add an extra $2 million in debt to the state’s books. The Planning Commission calculates our state coffers will be depleted by $50 million a year, for the next 30 years.
I will talk about Labor’s role in this, or more precisely, the failure of Labor to have a position in this. That is, the position that an opposition should take. The comments that Labor have made over the last six months about their concern about the levels of debt and their blistering evisceration of the Premier and his ministers, about their epic failure to deliver the Spirits on time, and the gross mismanagement and costs that have resulted from the Liberals failure to do that, do signal that Labor does appear to care about the impacts of large infrastructure costs. Disasters.
The Liberals, we know, have shown that they’re not capable of building a ferry terminal for the Spirits in Devonport without the budget blowing out by more than five times, from $90 million to $493 million and counting, or to do it without timeframes blowing out by years. Why would Labor think that the Liberals can keep financial control of the stadium project? What gives you confidence that this would happen, and where have your questions been about this? Where have the questions been for weeks and weeks about these issues? Why haven’t you asked them? Why haven’t you asked about –
Mr Willie – You can check Hansard from the other week, get your facts right.
The SPEAKER – Order.
Dr WOODRUFF – the loss for decades and decades to come of services to the community about the cuts to the budget that will come? This is a massive failure for Labor as an opposition. Where are the questions about the broken promises and the choices that the Premier has made all down the line about fast-tracking government’s processes, about attacking independent experts because of their valid comments and concerns? Where have they been? You have been absent.
The worst thing that has happened is to pretend to Tasmanians that you’re actually going to scrutinise this project. I will go back to the comments that the now honourable opposition leader, Mr Willie, made in the press conference in April this year, about the stadium. He was asked by David Killick from the Mercury. David Killick said:
Is there no limit to your support to the stadium? If it costs $2 billion or $3 billion or $4 billion? Is there nothing that can go wrong with this project that would cause you to oppose it?
The honourable Mr Willie said:
We’ll support the stadium through the parliament.
Mr Willie – It doesn’t mean it’s a blank cheque.
The SPEAKER – Order.
Dr WOODRUFF – In the same interview David Killick from the Mercury also asked:
So, the stadium is more important than good governance, it’s more important than not running up a massive debt, it’s more important than the environmental restrictions, than the traffic problems. There’s nothing that can happen with this project that can go wrong that will cause you to waiver in your support of it?
The honourable Mr Willie said:
We need to see him come to parliament and explain how he’s going to deliver on his promises for Tasmanians and how he’s going to address some of the concerns of the Planning Commission. But we will support the stadium through the parliament.
Why is it, Mr Willie and Labor, why did you vote against giving us time to go into Committee so we could ask the questions and get answers for Tasmanians.
Mr Willie – You support projects and policies, it doesn’t mean you’re signing over a blank cheque, does it?
The SPEAKER – Order. The honourable Leader of the Opposition is welcome to make a contribution on Adjournment tonight.
Mr Willie – I’m being incited, Speaker. She’s asking me questions.
Dr WOODRUFF – Why did you vote against us having sufficient time limits to 40 minutes so that we –
The SPEAKER – Dr Woodruff, through the Chair, please.
Dr WOODRUFF – could ask the questions that Tasmanians want answers to? Is every single member of Labor going to be asking questions of the government today, as Mr Willie promised people before an election earlier this year? We will see. You can be courageous with your vote, Labor. Other members can be courageous with their vote. It is time to vote with your conscience.
We all represent Tasmanians who are struggling. There are 81,000 Tasmanians who are hungry and cannot get a meal every day. This stadium will not feed them. That is the bottom line. This stadium will take $50 million and more out of the budget for every year for decades to come. That is not feeding hungry Tasmanians, it’s not building them a home and it’s not helping the healthcare situation.
To those people who are concerned about the Tassie team, I suggest you look to the mass enthusiasm to join the Tasmania Devils when the membership opened last year. We’ve got a quarter of a million members. At least 110,000 of us are residents of Tasmania, about one in five; and that speaks volumes to the enthusiasm and passion that’s backing the team. We’re not going to go back into the bottle, stadium or not, regardless of the AFL’s demands.
Mr Willie – How did your delegation go?
The SPEAKER – Order.
Dr WOODRUFF – We’re entering the VFL next year, and the women’s team will start in 2027, and the Greens and every other Devils member will back those teams and continue to fight, as we have for decades to come for our right to have them.
In the words of economist Nicholas Gruen, Tasmania is a proud state that for too long has given far more to the AFL team than it received. Our state deserves an AFL team and must have it at the right cost, but not at any cost. This vote is a reckoning for the Premier and all Tasmanians. Thanks to the Liberals’ hand at the wheel for over a decade, we’re now living far beyond our means and stealing from our children and our grandchildren. We’re paying interest on the interest to service our debt and to turn that ship around into calmer waters, Treasury’s advice and basic commonsense tells us we can’t add yet more billions of dollars of debt.
It’s a serious moment for us all, for the future of our much-beloved Hobart waterfront with its heritage and arts precinct, the sacred Cenotaph site, and the alternative vision of a truly iconic Macquarie Point park that would be lost forever if the stadium was built. It’s especially serious for the future of young Tasmanians who need extra government resources to flow into better schooling, public transport and home construction.
As the Treasurer says, this is about choices. For all these reasons, and to honour the commitments that the Greens have made to Tasmanians for three-and-a-half years and countless conversations ever since, the Greens will not be supporting this order to build a Macquarie Point stadium.
