Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, I move –
That so much of standing orders be suspended as would prevent all members from being able to speak to Notice of Motion No. 29 for up to 40 minutes each.
The Liberal and Labor parties have shut down the opportunity now for us to go into Committee and ask questions about the stadium, about the Planning Commission’s expert assessment, and about the order that the government has constructed to oversee the conditions that will utterly transform the centre of Hobart and transform the future of Tasmania. We are at a crossroads, and we have a right to have our voices heard. Our voices are the voices of our constituents. This is an opportunity that we need to have to express the passion, the concerns, the questions, the hopes, the sacrifices that Tasmanians will experience in terms of the opportunity cost with services that won’t get funded if this stadium goes ahead.
What we have is a Planning Commission’s report with an enormous amount of pages ‑ 256 pages ‑ a huge number of issues that they cover, which we want to give justice to. We want to lay out the facts, the work of the Planning Commission, their estimates of the disbenefit of the cost, the impacts in terms of the planning laws, the inconsistency between what’s going to be proposed and the Sullivans Cove Planning Scheme, the change to the urban form, the impacts on landscape and the visual effects from the stadium, the built form and the dominant presence of the stadium, the impacts on our historic cultural heritage, the Cenotaph, the loss of what should be an Aboriginal truth-telling and reconciliation space, the Regatta grounds and the lower Queens Domain precinct, the Goods Shed, the Royal Engineers building, the physical effects on the whole of the heritage of that beautiful part of the Constitution Dock and Evans Street. This is the reason that people come to this part of Hobart and Tasmania. People travel here in their droves to see what is so special.
We want to be able to talk about the impacts on our arts, on the TSO, on TMAG ‑ all the issues that have been raised by them. We want to talk about the transport effects, the movements and the traffic, the changes and the impacts that a stadium will have. We want to be able to talk about the things that haven’t been included by the government in their estimation, so people understand the lies behind the cost estimations that are being provided by the MPDC.
All of these things have to be teased apart. They’re in the Planning Commission’s report, and it is our job to lay them out on behalf of our constituents and for the people of Tasmania and for the future. We’re being expected, not only in a 20-minute speech, to lay out our objections, our concerns, and our questions about the order itself, but to respond to the Planning Commission’s knockdown of this project and the views of the whole of the Tasmanian community.
At least Labor can support this, to give us half a chance of being able to have enough time to do justice to our constituents’ concerns. It’s not too much to ask, given this is only the biggest infrastructure project that has ever come, as I understand, to the Parliament of Tasmania ‑ the biggest issue that we will ever make a decision about. How could Labor not want that to happen? How could Labor want to shut down the voices of everybody in the Chamber to stand up and make a representation? How many people from Labor will be speaking? I assume everyone will have something to say. Wouldn’t they like twice the length of time to say it properly? I would expect that everyone in Labor would be having a big fat say, but we know that that’s not nearly enough time. We could be spending hours. We’ve been modest, and we want to extend the debate for everyone to 40 minutes.
