Ms O’CONNOR (Hobart) – Mr President, I rise today to make a brief contribution about one of our most treasured cultural icons, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. The TSO is without a doubt world class. It is small, but it is world class, and it is respected on the international stage.
Like a number of members here, I availed myself of the invitation to visit the TSO last week with my electorate adviser Suz. While through the course of your life as a Tasmanian you will have any number of reasons to go to that beautiful little building down there on the waterfront for orchestral performances, for the graduation of my kids form university, to have that opportunity to look behind the scenes of the TSO, I can highly recommend it to honourable colleagues. I want to thank Caroline Sharpen, the CEO, for the time that she gave us to show us how the TSO ticks. Of course, an element of that conversation was the risk to the TSO posed by the proposed Macquarie Point stadium.
First of all, just a little bit about this beautiful orchestra. It has a national and global impact. It is our number one cultural export. It is the number one most recorded, broadcast and streamed orchestra in Australia. It has three quarters of a million audience participants, on average, each month around the world. It is Australia’s representative on global streaming service Symphony.live. The orchestra itself has 87 FTEs, including 47 full-time musicians, any number of whom are regarded as among the finest in their field. It directly employs 237 people, and its revenue is around $14 million per annum.
Our wonderful TSO’s ambition for education and outreach is that by 2030 every Tasmanian child will experience the orchestra by grade three. In 2024, 14,000 Tasmanian students attended the TSO. What a wonderful, rich cultural and educational experience for those young people. It is also a key player on the national music stage. We have two national training programs run by the TSO out of Hobart. Both the Australian Conducting Academy, which is creating the next generation of world-class conductors, and the Australian Composers School, are based with the TSO, in the Federation Concert Hall in Hobart.
We had quite an amazing opportunity to go into the back of the TSO, into the sound‑recording studio and listen to the sound of silence, which, at the TSO, is not silence. The venue has a very sophisticated audio‑recording system that has microphones that pick up the ambient noise of the city constantly. The sound of silence, which we listened to, was the sound of – we could hear a log truck rumbling along, we could hear motorbikes, we could hear the hum and bustle of the city. It is because of the sophistication of the sound recording booth there and a particularly talented person that the sound of ‘not silence’ of the city is able to be mitigated out of the TSO’s broadcasts and recordings.
We met Veronika Vincze, who is one of the most prestigious and skilled classical sound engineers anywhere in the world and she works here at the TSO. She was trained at the Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, another globally recognised and highly regarded institution. Veronika was able to explain to us all the elements that are within that ambient noise of the sound of silence.
To get to the crunchy bit, the proposed Macquarie Point stadium, as identified in the draft integrated assessment report, presents a significant risk to the TSO from ambient and construction noise and vibration during construction but also during operation, an impact on our world‑class orchestra. This has been identified by the Tasmanian Planning Commission and has been acknowledged today, in a lip‑service response from the Tasmanian government. The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra has spent a significant sum of its own money to have engineering and testing works done and has presented a plan for mitigation to the Tasmanian government should the stadium ever be built. Let us hope, it is not.
Every member of this place who will be voting on the proposed legislation, which I refer members to – it came out this morning, I highly recommend going down to the TSO because in the same way that, as the minister said, sport brings us together – and it should be bringing us together over the Devils – our iconic cultural institutions like the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra can also bring us together. After 75 years of service to Tasmania, of taking us onto the national and international stage, the TSO deserves our respect as a cultural icon and a massive contributor to the society and economy of this state. It also deserves for us to protect it and make sure it has another 75 years of giving to this island and its people.
