Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Thank you, Honourable Speaker, and I rise to talk to this MPI of waste and thank the member for Lyons for bringing it on. I wasn’t quite sure whether we were talking tin cans and plastic bags here but no, true to form, it’s about money and it’s about budget and it’s about this government and their inability to actually manage these issues.
I listened to Ms Butler, closely, around the prison kitchen issue and it does seem like a significant issue. I want to put on the table as well the waste and our position when it comes to prisons ‑ that a new 52‑bed maximum security unit at Risdon is something that is completely unnecessary and we should not be spending our money on.
However, I’m more than thankful to the Treasurer for raising the stadium in the context of this debate, and indeed, the shadow Treasurer raising the Spirits fiasco, because if we thought the Spirits fiasco was the height of this Liberal government’s incompetence and waste and expense to the taxpayer, I think it’s going pale into insignificance against the stadium. I’m glad the Treasurer raised the stadium. The stadium is already, writ large, epitomised by waste. We’ve paid over $3 million to a Melbourne housing developer not to build houses at Macquarie Point. We paid them out of a contract that we entered into. That is a crying shame. Not least to say the 10 years of wasted time and the millions and millions of dollars we gave to the Macquarie Point Development Corporation to work up an accepted development plan for the Macquarie Point site. It was quite a comprehensive plan, quite a well thought‑through plan, well consulted. It had housing, it had a Truth and Reconciliation park, it had an Antarctic science precinct, and a commercial area as well. This was completely junked; completely thrown out after 10 years and millions of dollars, because suddenly there was a stadium that was imposed upon us by the AFL as a cost to get the team that we deserve in our own right.
Now, the waste doesn’t stop there. We’re going to see waste across this project going forward for many, many years to come. Of course, this government then engaged the Tasmanian Planning Commission. This parliament, in fact, engaged the Tasmanian Planning Commission to assess the projects and, as best we can understand it, there was $3.3 million spent on legal costs by the Macquarie Point Development Corporation, the government, to have this project assessed, maybe $6 million for the Project of State Significance process itself, only to be what? Completely ignored. The advice from the Tasmanian Planning Commission – with experts in planning, with experts in governance, experts in architecture, in finance – the advice was very clear: do not proceed with this project. It is a problem. It’s going to have impacts on important values like the cenotaph, the heritage district, the traffic of the city. It’s going to cost way more than it said it would cost. In fact, the very day the Planning Commission released its report, the Premier announced a third cost blowout from $900 ‑odd million to the current price of $1.13 billion. No-one expects the cost to stay there and, of course, it’s going to cost the Tasmanian economy, and the Planning Commission said that it would diminish the economic welfare of all Tasmanians.
The stadium is going to be a case study in many years to come as to how not to waste money, how not to make bad decisions, because we are looking at a slow-moving train wreck. It’s clearly going to blow out in costs. There’s a whole lot of hidden costs that we don’t even understand yet. They’ve already had to abandon one proposal for power ‑ spent tens of thousands of dollars with TasNetworks to get a proposal to connect power to the site and a substation, and now that’s abandoned. Of course, we’re going to be borrowing hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars to develop this project, and that’s going to cost us tens of millions of dollars ‑ over $40 million a year from the general government sector simply to service the debt. We’re going to be borrowing money to service the debt to build the stadium.
This is a slow-moving train wreck that comes on top of other wasteful projects that the government seems to be keen to push on with. Common ticketing for buses, the AI accelerator project, $10 million to a private developer of a convention centre at Launceston. Why is it that a developer should get $10 million of public money? There’s Marinus Link and, of course, Tasracing: a $40 million subsidy a year for Tasracing, and a significant amount of that, almost $10 million, to greyhounds ‑ to torture greyhounds on the racetrack.
