Ms O’CONNOR (Hobart) – Mr President, what a lot of pap. What a lot of rubbish. Selective reference to the Hobart City Council’s submission and concerns relating to this project – obviously, if you are building a stadium in the middle or on the edge of the CBD, there will be a lot more money sloshing around. That is a no-brainer, which the Hobart City Council acknowledged, but in its briefing to members, which I was disappointed not to see a number of members attend the other day, Hobart City Council laid out in more detail its concerns and why it is fundamentally not supportive of this project:
Lack of engagement with the Aboriginal community –
It notes through its own economic modelling:
While significant local economy benefits may be experienced through the realisation of the project, the cost to the state and opportunity costs from the loss of realising alternative development outcomes for the site outweigh these localised economic benefits.
The council:
- broadly agrees with the panel’s assessment that the size of the stadium is disproportionate to Hobart’s small scale and established built form;
- agrees with the panel regarding the significant risks of large crowd events impacting public and road user journeys;
- shares the panel’s concerns regarding site contamination, groundwater, storm water management and the disposal of excavated materials and assets, and the need for detailed approval conditions and management plans to mitigate these concerns.
The hide of the government to come in here and rattle off some numbers to us: ‘It will generate this much money, it will create this many jobs.’ This government cannot lie straight in bed on the finances of this project, and yet they expect us to believe these numbers. We cannot believe a single number that drops out of their mouth. We have gone from ‘$375 million and not one red cent more’ to nearly a billion dollars ‑ $945 million.
This whole project is built on a foundation of lies. That is part of what makes it so maddening, not just for the Greens or the member for Hobart. I encourage members who are doing a big spruik on this project to go out there and talk to people around the state a little more. Go and knock on some doors. During the last federal election campaign, the most recent one we just had, I had the pleasure of doorknocking ‑ and it is a pleasure, because you are invited into people’s lives a little. You get to hear what their hopes and dreams are. The single biggest, unprovoked issue that came up ‑ because when I am doorknocking, I say to people, ‘When you go in the ballot booth, what are you going to be thinking about?’ The single biggest issue is the stadium, and it is not that they love it.
What is happening here is we have a government and a craven opposition that are trying to impose it on us. They tell us this is the way it is going to be, just like Gil McLachlan did that day when he swanned into town in his suit and told the provincials down here that they needed a stadium. The AFL has never asked any other club in the league to build a new stadium for the right to be in the national league, but you know what? They did not really want us in the league. That is a fact. That is how we got here. They thought they would set the bar so high we would fail. We have a premier who is apparently prepared to fail at the first hurdle if the stadium does not get up through his poxy bill.
On the Adelaide Oval, we hear this touted a bit. Any member who has been to the Adelaide Oval knows that the apron of that development is much larger than Macquarie Point. It sits on parklands. It was a redevelopment of an existing stadium, not a new development. It had a $450 million cap initially, which was extended to $535 million, and the project ended up costing $610 million in total for a redevelopment ‑ not a new stadium.
Prior to the development, South Australia was home to two existing AFL teams, Adelaide and Port Adelaide. They were an established AFL state, for which Adelaide Oval would be both those teams’ home ground. When I was 20 years old, I went down to watch Port Adelaide play AFL at some fantastic stadium. I cannot remember what it was; presumably it was the old Adelaide Oval ‑ perfectly adequate for those two teams in the national league for all those decades until they had enough money to redevelop Adelaide Oval.
At Adelaide Oval, they play 22 rounds of AFL and AFLW each year. We have seven proposed for Mac Point. It also hosts approximately 30 cricket matches a year. We want to put a roof on this stadium that makes playing cricket here basically impossible, but it is like the permit. Today we are told everything will be fine because they will fix it with lighting.
South Australia has a population of 1.8 million people ‑ more than three times the size of our population – 1.8 million people. They get a redeveloped oval that was affordable, apparently, and it was part of a community conversation. In fact, it was taken to an election. This stadium was also taken to an election on a massive fib, when the Premier said to the people of Tasmania on the day after the election was called, ‘$375 million, not one red cent more’. He came back into this House (the other place) reduced in number, smacked about by the Tasmanian people, who gave them another dust‑up at the last federal election, then, just for good measure, another dust‑up at the Legislative Council elections.
This project is on‑the‑nose with the Tasmanian people. That rubbish we just heard that was written by someone, in some office, somewhere ‑ it was not written by the Acting Leader of Government Business, we can be 100 per cent sure of that ‑ is the same garbage we have been subjected to since this began. We are being fibbed to and we are having something imposed on us that nobody asked for, except the Premier and a few of his ministers when the AFL rocked into town and told them exactly how it was going to be.
Well, the Tasmanian people are bigger than the AFL. They are bigger than this government. They have made their view plain. Overwhelmingly, on the numbers, whether it is anecdotal or on hard data, the Tasmanian people by a significant majority do not support a new stadium at Macquarie Point. They do not want parliament to approve it through a corrupted piece of legislation that seeks to bypass our independent and proper planning system.
The last thing, which I cannot leave this lectern without saying ‑ what a disgraceful thing to come in here again and slur Dr Nicholas Gruen, a former member of the Business Council of Australia, former Productivity Commissioner, a member of the prestigious King School of Economics in London. Dr Gruen spoke to a whole range of people as part of his investigation into this stadium. This cooked‑up excuse about an apprehension of bias is just that, because the government needed a reason to rip this stadium out of the planning commission. They looked back to Gruen ‑ one of the most respected economists in the world ‑ and they said, ‘What you did was biased.’ I tell you what ‑ not one of them stepped out the front of this place and said that because it is not true. They do not have the guts to slur and defame him outside the protection of parliamentary privilege. The same goes for the panel members on the Tasmanian Planning Commission. It is nauseating to hear the Leader of Government Business thank the panel after we have had long periods in that place, and this place, of government undermining that panel’s work. Do not thank a group of people you have denigrated and shafted. It does not come across as particularly sincere.
Report considered and noted.
