Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honorable Speaker, I move ‑
That so much of Standing Orders be suspended as would prevent such a motion from being dealt with forthwith.
At the heart of this is the reality of what we have witnessed over the last year, starting with the first day of the election campaign and continuing with the announcement made by the Premier just recently that there will be no public‑private partnership that will be coming. This is the magic fairy that the Premier has been pretending to Tasmanians all year will be there to fill what we now understand is an enormous gap between what he promised – the red line in the sand; $375 million and not a red cent more – and the truth of what the stadium is going to cost.
Those final figures have not come out yet, but it is very clear from the successive reports that have been done by Saul Eslake, Nicholas Gruen and now the Tasmanian Planning Commission panel that it will cost us in the order of something like $2 billion over the next decade. It will be an enormous intergenerational debt for Tasmanians. It will put at risk our credit rating. It is such a loss‑making exercise that the Premier and his staff and the Macquarie Point Development Corporation, despite working flat out with a full resources of government, have failed to find anybody who is willing to put their money on the line to get involved with this venture. Every single estimate, KPMG, the government’s own business case, and every successive following business case that has been done, has found it will lose money for every dollar that is spent: 47 cents in the dollar.
What we are talking about here, at its very heart, are the reasons that the Premier chose to make that promise to Tasmanians. He knew he was utterly on the nose in Bass and Braddon. It has played out and shown out again and again – every poll shows that 2/3 of Tasmanians, and especially people living in Bass and Braddon and Lyons, do not want this stadium. They do not want the stadium because they know how incredibly important it is that that cost, upwards of $2 billion, is spent on critical services, healthcare, housing.
They also know that there is an excellent stadium in the north. It is gratuitous and wanton to lay down to the AFL and to give in to them on what can only be described now as the Premier’s vanity project, when there are such incredibly important services that need to be funded. We are looking at a budget that is about to cut the guts out of these important services.
What we are also looking at is a corrupted process. The worst we have ever seen in Tasmania’s history, seeking to ram through legislation to fast track, rubber stamp, approve this massive development.
What we have seen over the last year, on every occasion the Greens have had the opportunity to ask the Premier this question in Budget Estimates, in Question Time, at every opportunity, we have asked him to fill in the details between $375 million and the real cost of the stadium. He has continued to perpetrate the lie that there will not be $375 million spent or more than that. But what we know is today, he is still pretending to Tasmanians that there are some different buckets of money, there is capital money and there is other money, as though it is not Tasmanians who will be footing the whole cost.
That is the point here. He has lied to Tasmanians. He made a promise in the election and that was a promise that he could have kept. Today he can keep that promise. If he wants the confidence of this House, he needs to not mislead, not be deceitful any longer. He needs to stop with the lies. He either needs to say, ‘I admit I made a promise, I have broken that promise, and stand on his word and be honest with Tasmanians’ – what he needs to do is to walk away from the stadium project. Because what he is going to do is push through something that Tasmanians do not want. We do not need it. And it is going to cost us a fortune for generations to come, money that should be spent elsewhere.
We are calling on the Premier to recognise that he made a fundamental promise to Tasmanian people, that his integrity is in tatters, he cannot be trusted, and now his position is untenable as Premier.
Time expired.
