Dear David O’Byrne,

We respond to your recent epistle in a Hobart paper in support of a stadium at any cost, noting, as explained below, you most likely have not read the very report you criticise, nor the Government’s Terms of Reference engaging Dr Gruen. We ask that, if you are going to re-publish these claims, you take account of the following:

You stated: It’s no secret that I am a supporter of a Tasmanian football club and the Macquarie Point stadium. However, my support comes with a dose of realism, acknowledging that in life we rarely have a perfect process or set of conditions to allow us to achieve what could be a wonderful outcome.

‘Perfect is the enemy of good’? So, we are expected to accept the ‘less than adequate verging on woeful’ as realistic? That’s your baseline? Your ‘dose of realism’ looks more like acceptance of a corrupted process, born of poor leadership and a lack of vision.

In this case, however, there really wasn’t any process – this fiasco sprang fully formed from our Premier’s mind in his desperate attempt to impress an AFL bigwig and paint himself as a hero. Either that, or just a transparent attempt to avoid scrutiny of his hapless premiership.

Stumbling from one fiasco to the next disaster, bouncing off guard rails hastily erected around all the other examples of incompetence* does not constitute a ‘process’. And, as Dr Gruen says, the “process’ of site selection was clearly gamed to land a stadium at Macquarie Point.

Sorry David, but your attempt to dismiss this $1Bn+ monstrosity being foisted on us as one of those times ‘in life’ when everything isn’t perfect demonstrates your arrogant disregard for the facts and significance of what this will mean for Tasmanians for decades to come.

The stadium has become a divisive issue, and let’s be honest, it was always going to be.

Sounds like you’re saying we should shy away from anything that tests us as not worth fighting for if it can be cast as divisive. If it was always going to be divisive, why support it in the first place?? Who’s actually responsible for this divisiveness, then?

Our society is diminished by this constant recourse to declaring anyone who disagrees with you as ‘divisive’. Other epithets like NIMBY and ‘anti-everything’ and ‘blockers not builders’ are thrown around in ad hominem and strawman attacks worthy of a junior high school debate.

Writing off considered objections from concerned citizens and qualified experts in relevant fields as ‘divisive’ is simple cowardice, changes the focus from the problem and gags the debate, disenfranchising many from a better understanding of the issues.

And it ignores the indisputable fact that the proposal is divisive because of its failed process, wrong location and dire economic consequences.

The State Government have been very poor in explaining how and why certain decisions have been made around the stadium.

Agreed, although ‘absent’ or ‘complete failures’ may be better terms. This is a big ask, however, because any honesty in explaining how and why ‘decisions’ have been made would show the Premier for the naked emperor he is. And it ignores that the decisions that need explaining are themselves the product of administrative incompetence and corruption of process. They are inexplicable.

They have not engaged well with the community on where the project is at, nor have they fully explained the benefits.

There. Are. No. Benefits . . . at least none that will flow back into the coffers of those who will pay for this. Four cost benefit analyses have been conducted into this publicly funded stadium and none has been able to achieve a positive return to taxpayers. The government can’t afford to ‘fully explain’ that – you wouldn’t be able to see their lips move through the egg on their face.

The latest episode in this is the release of the Gruen report. For the record I have not met Mr Gruen and have no relationship with him.

That’s Dr Gruen. His qualification and title are made clear from the Terms of Reference engaging him. In any event, whether you know Dr Gruen or not is irrelevant to your superficial assessment of his work.

Mr Gruen states Tasmania deserves an AFL team – but the stadium is too heavy a price to pay and the deal should be renegotiated. Well Tasmania has deserved a team now for 30 years and where has that got us?

Dr Gruen was commissioned to examine the impacts – financial, social, environmental – of building a stadium at Macquarie Point. He examined the AFL Agreement’s fitness for purpose in that context. He found the negative impacts on the stadium build to be exacerbated by the Agreement – its overspecification, its intrusion into Tasmanian domestic politics, its failure to recognise Tasmania’s status as an AFL heartland state with inclusions more appropriate to an expansion market of untested support. These all go beyond its legitimate interest in team viability, so much so it was risking considerable reputational damage. ‘Where that has got us’ is to a point where our doltish Premier has offered up his state’s sovereignty in supplication to a sporting conglomerate. Dr Gruen shows how that could have been ‘played’ better and that this agreement is way too high a price to pay for a Tasmanian AFL/AFLW team.

Putting this another way, more is needed than simply ‘deserving’ AFL/AFLW teams. We need planning, funds, political leadership and a united community. Our politicians in the Liberal and Labor parties – and you Mr O’Byrne – have failed the community on all fronts over the past two decades. The AFL agreement is the best evidence of this failure.

The AFL is a ruthless organisation, they make hard-nosed business decisions, if we want a team we need to get their agreement.

Dr Gruen played a major role in the instigation of the Button Plan during the Hawke Labor government, and he’s been a board member of the Productivity Commission and the Business Council of Australia, so he’d be used to dealing with ‘ruthless’ and ‘hard-nosed’ business decisions. They probably don’t scare him as much as they clearly do you. The AFL board would do well to take his advice re reputational risk to heart. There are many circles in Tasmania where the AFL’s reputation is already damaged.

Mr Gruen seems oblivious to the internal politics at play between the AFL Executive and the all-powerful Commission heavily influenced by the club Presidents.

Dr Gruen was engaged to conduct an independent economic analysis. Internal AFL politics are irrelevant to this engagement. Dr Gruen assigns responsibility where it should go – to the AFL to deal with Team Viability (and its own internal politics) – and to the Tasmanian people to determine where, when and how much with regard to team facilities. You seem far too eager to roll over and relinquish our state’s autonomy to a group of old white guys in suits.

The Gruen report recommends delaying a new stadium for five to seven years despite Macquarie Point Development Corporation documents revealing each year the build is delayed, $80m is added to the cost.

Seriously?? You seem to have cherry picked the one piece of data for which the TPC don’t have to send the MPDC back to the drawing board to deliver. That $80 million only applies IF the stadium is built in that location. Furthermore, you ignore the massive costs that will flow from the wrong stadium in the wrong place. And you ignore that there was no demand for a stadium at Macquarie Point. Look at Waverley Park in Melbourne as an example of a failed AFL stadium.

Mr Gruen is right to cite concerns about budget, but can anyone name an infrastructure project that has not been under costed in Australia in the last 30 years?

Hmmm . . . confusing! Do we suddenly not care about cost over-runs? Doesn’t that make your last point about delays costing $80M pa moot?

But you haven’t actually dealt with him being “right to cite concerns about budget” except to again dismiss the major concern of Dr Gruen’s review – its impact on the State Budget, debt and deficit. Why ignore this?

Your acceptance of cost overruns on major projects is a perfect example of the “optimism bias” which Dr Gruen so validly identifies as a flaw in the stadium costings.

Impacts on state budget are real, agreed.

‘Impacts on state budget are real, agreed’ but let’s steer well clear of them here? Why is there no assessment by you of those impacts, and how they will be funded. Your approach is reminiscent of how the Tasmanian Parliament rubber-stamped any hydro dam development in the decades leading up to Franklin Dam decision in the High Court in 1983. As a Tasmanian MHA, side-stepping budget consequences is irresponsible. See also the report of Saul Eslake from 2024 on Tasmania’s serious budget problems.

But in this matter we do not have the luxury of time.

Why don’t we have the ‘luxury of time’? We have functioning AFL venues in Bellerive Oval in Hobart and York Park in Launceston that are already built, paid for and completely uncontroversial. Why paint us as cowering sycophants?

If time reveals that Macquarie Point is the wrong location and upgrading York Park will satisfy more Tasmanian fans in terms of access, parking, distance from home and budgetary implications, that ‘time’ will have been well spent, and left $100millions in state coffers.

Surely ‘time’ is the one thing we can afford. Time to go back and get it right. Time for planning and consultation. Don’t allow this to become another episode of Utopia.

The opportunity is now. If we lose it, we will not only lose our club but also the massive economic uplift that the facility will bring.

According to Dr Gruen and Saul Eslake, the ‘opportunity is now’ to avoid a state budget crisis.

This argument about ‘opportunity’ is the only argument you have left and it’s wearing thin: conflate the stadium with getting a team (pssst, it’s the team that brings the economic benefits), ignore that most of the agreement cannot be fulfilled anyway, and then target the messengers of any arguments to the contrary. The State of Tasmania has already breached the contract in a number of areas. For example, the High-Performance Centre (HPC) is set for Kingston (not close to the CBD). Nor does anyone seriously believe that the stadium can be built to the AFL agreement timelines.

Mr Gruen uses a range of methods to come up with his $1.4 bn cost estimate, a figure covering a 30 year period. I question some of these methods.

If you’d read the whole report, and not just the summary, you would see that Dr Gruen goes to some lengths to explain his reasoning and justify his methods. He has decades of experience in this field. What are your qualifications and your methodology? Where is your explanation of your considered rejection of his methodology? Why did you not read the report properly?

These include the government’s $91m Devils subsidy as a stadium cost. This would have to be paid no matter whether a stadium was built.

This relates to the Dr Gruen’s assertions around the AFL stepping beyond its legitimate purview in over-specifying conditions regarding the stadium build, and thereby making every component of the team agreement a cost associated with the stadium. The way the contract is structured, including matters that go beyond team viability, make this an additional cost associated with the stadium. It is not. The coupling of the team and stadium is a major policy failure and a corruption of process.

You seem to be implying that we could have a team without a stadium when you state “the government’s $91m Devils subsidy . . . would have to be paid no matter whether a stadium was built.” Can we now abandon this furphy of conflating the two?

It then follows that the AFL’s $360m contribution to the club should be counted as a stadium benefit. But it is not.

No, it’s not included as a stadium benefit, because it goes towards the club which requires HPC training facilities. Those aren’t included as a cost either. It’s effectively the AFL’s contribution towards a training centre. Wherever the team plays, it will need a location to train. That was originally going to be Cornelian Bay, then it moved to Rosny Parklands, now it’s to be in Kingston.

Dr Gruen holds that the Team Agreement should never have included a stadium, especially one so overly specified as to seating, roofing, and location, and is therefore not fit for purpose. Perhaps had the Premier run the contract by Treasury, or the State’s Attorney General, or even his own Cabinet, before so blithely signing away his state’s future, these issues would have been picked up (and addressed). Furthermore, Dr Gruen’s treatment of the AFL contribution is the product of his considerable expertise as an economist. You do not have that expertise.

Mr Gruen has come to the position that the stadium is in the wrong place, ignoring the reality that successful stadiums in Australia are in CBDs.

How successful are they in reality? Perth’s Optus stadium for example runs at a loss; both it and Adelaide’s require ongoing state government funding to attract games and events; Stadiums Queensland also runs an operating loss. Stadia may shift money around but they rarely, if ever, pay off their initial investors.

As for ‘successful stadiums in Australia are in CBDs’ – that’s nonsense. An aerial view of stadia around the country shows them to be well away from their CBDs. Comparing Hobart with other capitals is also questionable. Even comparing us with Townsville, as a regional example that is closer in size, does not support the argument. The Townsville stadium is not in the CBD, and the surrounding road networks in all cases are very different from the crowded corner of Mac Point. Just the area of land alone makes any comparisons with other city stadia absurd. Other stadia are surrounded by parklands. That is not possible at Mac Point. You should fact-check your assumptions before making these claims.

It takes about 40 minutes to walk from Brisbane GPO to The Gabba, 45 minutes from Perth GPO to Perth Stadium, and 50 minutes from Sydney GPO to the SCG. One could walk, ferry and walk from Hobart GPO to Bellerive Oval in less time than all of these, around 35 to 40 minutes. Launceston GPO to York Park is a brisk 15-minute walk.

Both Gold Coast Suns and Greater Western Sydney, the most recent recipients of AFL licences, have modest suburban home grounds without rooves.

I agree the process was inadequate but that does not necessarily follow that it’s the wrong site, it’s not an ideal site but it’s the only one we have.

In saying, ‘it’s not an ideal site‘, you are correct, but that’s a major understatement. It’s a totally inappropriate site for a structure of this scale.

But you are wrong in saying it’s ‘the only one we have‘. Another stadium is not needed, but if you are intent on throwing good money after bad and sending the state into decades of debt, there are many other locations that would provide enough space to build and access games at a stadium without its imposition on heritage, Indigenous culture and urban visual integrity, or creating transport nightmares during and after construction. Sites that are more geologically stable. Sites that are truly ‘unoccupied’, unlike Macquarie Point that had a number of existing structures which the Premier overlooked in his ‘wasteland’ epithet. An Indigenous enterprise was operating in The Long House, a Tucker Garden was producing vegetables and herbs for locavore restaurateurs, as well as the heritage listed Goods Shed – a flexible venue space – and Hobart Brewing’s Red Shed bar and function centre, all of which are either already razed or destined to be razed and rebuilt elsewhere.

Macquarie Point is a site that would be better suited to other uses – far more appropriate in scale, imaginative in design and construction, and ultimately more useful than a stadium that will lie vacant for more than 90% of the time.

Finally, if you accept the process was inadequate, how can you assert it is not the wrong site? With that logic, we could look to build a nuclear power station there.

Mr Gruen refers to the Regatta point stadium as a possibility without even acknowledging the similar type of public investment required and makes no mention of the many environmental challenges facing that proposal, challenges clearly outlined by planning expert Brian Risby in a recent Opinion piece in this paper.

If you read the Terms of Reference, you’ll understand that Dr Gruen was commissioned to review the Mac Point Precinct proposal. By the ‘Regatta point stadium’ we assume you mean what the MPDC calls ‘Mac Point 2.0’. Dr Gruen does refer to Mac Point 2.0 but only in the context of PPPs and as a ‘tool’ to create competitive tension, whereby alternative proposals are examined during the planning process to assess where they offer improvements that might be integrated into the proponent’s plans. This is something he recommends should be done whenever a planning decision is made.

Because Mac Point 2.0 is largely a privately funded operation, assuming ‘only’ the original, and already exceeded, $715M commitment from the state, any challenges or risks it faces beyond that would be the responsibility of the private proponents to resolve, nothing to do with the Tasmanian Government, and are therefore irrelevant to Dr Gruen’s analysis.

The report also omits the stadium’s 1500 seat function centre from his calculations – I find this puzzling to say the least. The function centre will be more than double the size of the city’s current largest venue.  It’s hard to overstate the transformative impact this will have on the state’s economy. This aspect of the project is to me one of the most compelling arguments for the stadium yet no one seems to know about it.

No, it’s not. There may be an argument for a 1500 seat function centre, but that doesn’t have to be attached to a stadium. And where is the evidence of need for a venue this size? Please show us the analysis. Will it just be another empty space for most of its life? How often are events organisers being turned away from Tasmania because of a lack of venue space?

Furthermore, and this is also something Dr Gruen points out, the cost of fitting out this space has been excised from the $775M budget, with some ‘imaginary friend’ expected to take up a lease and run it as a private concern. The problem with that is, if such a venue is ultimately a net revenue raiser, then the state has handed over an income earning asset to a private profiteer, and as Dr Gruen suggests, this is at taxpayers’ expense in the long run. The degree of loss depends entirely on the deal struck with the privateer, and how good the government is at negotiating.

This government is hopeless at negotiating. The ALP’s equivocation and lack of clarity regarding the stadium make it unlikely to be any better.

Mr Gruen compares Mac Point with Rod Laver arena but fails to recognise the market within which it competes. Rod Laver arena has competition in the Melbourne market, the Mac Point development will not, it will stand alone.

Yes, it will stand alone as a venue for 7 games a year. Even if it can attract the 44 events in KPMG’s optimistic scenario, it will only do so by paying the teams or acts ‘incentives’ to play or perform there. Furthermore ‘recognising the market in which it competes’ means recognising the size of the population active in that market. Melbourne is 20 times larger than Hobart; Victoria has 12 times the population of Tasmania. Is Rod Laver Arena competing with 19 other comparable venues? If the stadium ‘stands alone’ (debatable given York Park, Bellerive, the DEC etc), it does so in a much smaller market. The stadium will compete for music events for example with the revamped Showgrounds arena which is in fact already funded, approved and under construction.

Mr Gruen quotes crowd figures to justify his pessimistic position citing the poor crowds when Nth Melbourne played Carlton in Hobart in 2018/2019, but conveniently ignores when Carlton played in Launceston against Hawthorn in 2016 and 2019 the crowd numbers were 18k and 15k respectively. These numbers reflect the low supporter base of the Kangaroos and mirror their challenges in Melbourne.

Mr Gruen decides that a Tasmania v Collingwood match at the new stadium will not draw higher interstate visitation than a North Melbourne v Gold Coast match at Bellerive. Seriously?

He also ignores the massive potential of ex-pat Tasmanians (40k+ foundation members in Victoria alone) coming ‘home’ to watch their team.

Dr Gruen is a statistician, so he uses verifiable data not pie-in-the-sky ‘potential’ estimates. He drew on a range of attendance figures – best and worst – to find a statistical average. Whatever the reason for these attendances is immaterial to this exercise. He doesn’t ‘decide’ anything, rather he allows the data to determine the result. It’s not about wishful or pessimistic thinking. He does note however that the figures presented in the proposal fail to include the ‘cost’ of Tasmanian fans who may fly interstate to attend away games, taking their money to the mainland with them.

This is beside the fact that your call for a new stadium in Hobart is completely undermined by your own reference to crowd numbers of 18k and 15k in Launceston.

Furthermore, you ignore the loyalty fans hold for their existing mainland teams, seeming to imagine that Tasmanians will automatically switch allegiances away from teams they’ve supported for decades. Have you any evidence for this?

The report does not consider revenues generated from stadium naming rights, conservatively priced at $5m a year ($150m over 30 years). This may be included as part of the $5m “other revenues” but naming rights alone will be at least $5m a year based on Optus Stadium which signed a 10-year deal for $50m in 2017.

Again this is a false equivalence – Optus Stadium in Perth with a population 4.5 times larger than Hobart, services the SW corner of WA where 75% of the state’s population lives, totalling 3 million people or 6 times the population of Tasmania. It would be more appropriate to examine existing naming rights agreements with UTAS and (Shark) Ninja, but those figures aren’t publicly available. Many things have changed since 2017.

Also, WA has two AFL teams so Optus stadium can host a home game every week in season. Yet it still runs an operating loss and the government pays incentives to attract performers. And Optus stadium has no roof.

Mr Gruen estimates the cost of moving the goods shed at $18m, despite the MPDC estimating the cost to be 6m and the Gruen appointed quantity surveyor estimating it would be $7m. He bases $18m on ‘conversations’ he’s had with other people.

In another transparent attempt to diminish Dr Gruen’s credibility, you are deliberately misquoting him. His “discussions with several parties” include independent and experienced experts in quantity surveying, heritage architecture and urban planning. He makes the point that calculations based on the WT cost report for the MPDC are questionable because it specifically excludes a list of items which his consultations have calculated to add an additional $242 million to the stadium build. He makes the point that “whatever the figure is, it is a cost of building the stadium and should be publicly accounted as such”.

Mr Gruen dismisses the potential economic development around the stadium, citing a US report about US stadiums. No consideration of Australian stadium models and no acknowledgment that this facility will be a massive increase in our capacity, unlike in the US where stadiums are privately owned and are in established markets with comparable and competing venues.  How many hotels have been built in Hobart since the opening of MONA?

Dr Gruen hasn’t ‘dismissed’ potential economic development. It’s just not his role to turn flights of fancy into statistical realities. Unlike the government, he is wary to deploy the ’magic asterisk’. Potential economic development can’t be measured, especially when the stadium proposal fails to present any inkling of what’s intended ‘around the stadium’. The ‘future foreshore residential zone’ shown on the MPDC zone plan, albeit a necessity if the project is to qualify for the federal grant directed to the whole precinct, has not been detailed, nor costed, and will only drive up the final price once it is.

Trying to predict what development might occur ‘around the stadium’ by reference to other Australian stadium models, requires that there be some land ‘around the stadium’ to develop. That’s clearly not the case at Mac Point. This will not only impact on development ‘around the stadium’, it will create a logistics nightmare during the construction process. And, you ignore that there’s no public transport to and from the Mac Point site, which is isolated.

Another spurious analogy is the referencing of MONA. MONA is open 6 days a week all year round. No-one’s going to build a hotel to house guests for 44 nights a year. Dr Gruen gives a detailed analysis of benefits in Chapter 9 of his Review and concludes that they are overly optimistic and therefore over-estimated, particularly in terms of tourism associated with the stadium. One area he does assign a positive benefit is to an increase in cruising, but people on cruise ships don’t usually need hotel rooms.

If you had taken the time to actually inform yourself about the Harvard study, you would understand its relevance to a situation where public funds are stumped up to cover the costs of a venture in which profits ultimately flow to the private sector.

I will make my last reflection on the Gruen report by returning to the start: The report’s startling claim Tasmania can’t afford a stadium because we have too many social and economic problems.

As a local MP I see the team and the stadium as a way to address some of these challenges.

Conflating team and stadium again, and a $billion stadium is a disproportionately costly way to address social problems, however you envisage that to occur, and is far more likely to exacerbate economic challenges. You have been saying this since early 2024, without explaining how these challenges will be addressed. We suggest you, as a State MHA, find ways to address Tasmania’s health, housing, environmental and educational challenges that do not rely on such an absurd, costly and inappropriate project – one which will only make these problems worse.

Give young people and their families in working class areas something to dream about, something to believe in, a reason to stay and for those that have left a reason to come home.

Is that really the best you have to offer ‘working class’ families? It sounds like a ‘bread and circuses’ placation of a group for whom you have little empathy. Is your solution to provide a stadium at the cost of health, housing and education? Have you no greater vision or answer to the problems that fester, barely addressed, in Tasmania?

Are you basing your assertions for ‘a reason to stay . . . a reason to come home’ on any data about the number of Tasmanians who have left the state because it lacks a roofed stadium? Or even, lacks a Tasmanian AFL team. What are your numbers?

Finally, I do not buy into the argument that funding major infrastructure such as a stadium must come at the expense of essential public services like hospitals and housing.

Good governments can and should do both.

Apart from the fact that it’s not an argument Dr Gruen makes, but rather one made by Saul Eslake in his earlier analysis of the state’s finances, how exactly do you propose that we service a $Bn loan requiring repayments of $50M/annum, without it impacting on health, education, public housing etc. over the next 20 years?

Good state governments stick to their knitting and take care of their constitutional obligations. Infrastructure projects that benefit all, yes. Handing over $300+ million worth of public land to a sporting conglomerate and spending another $860 million on a sports complex is not good governance.

Added to the loan repayments are the ongoing costs of maintaining and servicing the facilities. Where do we get the money to pay the maintenance bill when birds perforate the plastic roof and the ‘pillows’ deflate (as has happened elsewhere with this tech)? Or their guano eats into its surface further diffusing the light? Or the turf has to be replaced after each big event that occupies the playing surface?

It’s not like we have been saving up for this for decades and are now looking at our fat bank account to decide how to spend our money. The money does not exist. Your blithe disregard for that fact is telling.

You should be aware the MPDC asserts that a workforce to construct a stadium at Mac Point will require 100 + houses in the Hobart area. Do you suggest there are 100 + houses empty? How do you address the reality that this will force rents up and push about 100 households into homelessness?

Spruiking the ‘massive economic uplift the stadium will bring’ forces the question ‘will’? Where is that written? Please provide one piece of evidence/research to support this claim. We’ll match that with ten to the contrary. One can usually ‘follow the money’ from the public purse into privateers’ pockets – these so-called economic benefits rarely make their way back into the coffers of the stadium builders.

The cost benefit analyses clearly show the economic benefit is dwarfed by the costs. Real costs, to be paid by Tasmanians.

Your support for the rhetoric of crony capitalism leads us to question your ‘independence’. Betfair – the AFL’s gaming partner – made significant donations to the Tasmanian Liberal Party just before the stadium was announced. Have they donated money to you? What’s your policy on these donations and how they corrupt the process of government decision-making about a stadium at Mac Point?

* Other examples of incompetence: Unbuilt ferry terminal; ferries themselves that have to be berthed on the other side of the world at great expense – >$300M/annum in berthing fees and lost revenue; road widening cost blowouts of over 100%; reneging on promises of bridge extensions, improved staffing levels in health and education; and imposing ‘efficiency dividends’ to disguise cuts in public services.

Our Place – Hobart is a community group with an alternative vision for the Macquarie Point site.