Transcript of media conference with Greens Leader Cassy O’Connor and Residents Opposed to the Cable Car Spokesperson Vica Bayley, Hunter St, Hobart, 9 December 2022.
Cassy O’Connor
Well here we go again. Another day in Tasmania and the white shoe brigade is walking into the Premier’s office and getting its way. What this tells us is that if you’re a Liberal mate in Tasmania, you can walk into the Premier’s office and call the shots. It is disgraceful.
This cable car proposal has been rejected by the Hobart City Council, rejected by the planning body, rejected by the people of Hobart, and yet we’ve got a Premier who wants to foist a stadium on this town and a cable car that no one wants. It’s a disgrace, and we will fight it all the way.
Vica Bayley
This is a completely perplexing move from Premier Rockliff. And we’d appeal to his sense of fairness and equity. This cable car has gone through a proper process, measured against this management plan, the planning scheme, and the proponent exercised its right to test that in the planning appeal. It was comprehensively rejected on 18 grounds.
And so the only way the Premier can intervene here is to toss out the management plan and the planning scheme and do away with third party appeal rights and fast track an assessment a la the pulp mill … let’s consider how successful that was.
Journalist – unidentified
Is ramming unsuccessful projects through the opposition of councils the intended use of major projects legislation, do you think?
Vica Bayley
Well look, major projects legislation was tailor-made and written for projects such as the kunanyi cable car: complex, controversial and non-compliant with existing management plans and planning scheme. So it would lend itself to a major projects legislation except that the Rockcliff government or at least the Gutwein government ruled out ever using major projects for the kunanyi cable car.
And indeed, the Hobart City Council has a role in agreeing to any proposal on that land being made a major project, so I’m not so sure that major projects is the solution here. It is a problem more broadly, but I’m not sure it’s the solution for the Mount Wellington Cableway Company.
I think this would take special legislation just like the pulp mill, and let’s cast our minds back 10 years to tell Tasmanians how successful that was both in terms of delivering a pulp mill and indeed bolstering the financial security of the company that proposed it.
