The premier likes dismissing those who are opposed to the stadium as anti-jobs. I am not anti-jobs. I am anti-lies.
The truth is that the stadium was always going to cost far more than the premier’s lie of a $375 million cap, that it was never to going to employ thousands, and it was never to going to be a boon.
The truth is that Tasmanians are already being sacked to pay for the stadium with the so-called efficiency dividend, as the crisis in health, education, housing and policing worsens daily because of the ever more destructive attempts by the government to balance a collapsing budget with the need to pay for an ever more expensive stadium.
Nicholas Gruen exposed the truth behind the lies: the stadium will cost at a minimum $1.1 billion and more likely as much as $1.7 billion, with a net return of just 44 cents in the dollar.i
In the contract Jeremy Rockcliff so recklessly signed with the AFL, Clause 21.4 specifies Tasmania is responsible for all cost overruns. We Tasmanian taxpayers are up for every last cent owing.
Tasmania’s budget this year is $9.7 billion. Tasmania’s total debt is projected to blow out, according to budget papers cited by Dr Gruen, to over $17.4 billion within the next two years. There is no pot of gold, no endless treasure chest, just a financial situation that is disastrous.
Worse, as Saul Eslake’s report makes clear, the only solution is cuts in public services and more taxes. That means stadium job cuts. That means stadium taxes.
Nor are there the thousands of jobs the premier routinely lies about being created in construction. Even his own consultant, LeftField Project Solutions, here on page 13 of their reportii, admits that at its peak the stadium will have a workforce of just 400 people, half of whom will be mainlanders. The report finds that they will push Hobart rents up by 1.1%. Not new homes being built at Macquarie Point, but a housing crisis worsened. Not more Tasmanians working, but more Tasmanians being sacked so less Tasmanians can build a stadium.
If there’s a 50% illiteracy rate in Tasmanian there is clearly a 100% illiteracy rate in the Tasmanian Liberal Government. Because they don’t seem to have read Gruen, far less their own consultants’ reports.
Here’s this gem from stadium consultant KPMG’s latest reportiii on page 15—
If existing schools and hospital are insufficient to meet the needs of Tasmanians . . . the benefits of building a new school or hospital will be very large, and almost certainly larger than the benefits of an equivalent investment in a stadium’
That the premier, with all the glee of an adolescent online shopping with his parents’ credit card bought a stadium, doesn’t make his purchase wise or right.
The AFL deal is a Trumpian cruelty imposed by an AFL that doesn’t care and signed by a premier who didn’t think. The stadium eats Tasmania’s very future. It is a destroyer of our society. Now Jeremy Rockcliff, the Elmer Fudd of Tasmanian politics, has to decide if AFL CEO Andrew Dillon is the premier of Tasmania— or he is.
But this is a weak premier. This is a cowardly premier. This is a deceitful premier who from the beginning has not told the truth about this stadium.
Every day I walk on the Domain past homeless people and I am ashamed as a Tasmanian. Every day I hear stories of people’s suffering because we have the worst and worsening health system in the nation. And I am ashamed. I am a Booker Prize winner and my island home has a 50% illiteracy rate. And I am ashamed. And I am most ashamed that the only answer our government can make to any of these terrible problems is the immense folly of a stadium that will only worsen all Tasmanians’ lives in its disastrous financial impacts.
We need someone in the Liberal government with the guts to say to the AFL: we Tasmanians run Tasmania, not the AFL. To say the truth: we cannot afford this stadium. To say to the AFL we will decide if and when a stadium will be built, we will decide what sort of stadium we will build, and we will decide where that stadium is sited.
And until a time that will be of our choosing, you will not take our team from us, our team will play at our two existing stadia, and we are supporting that team with the most generous state support of any sporting team in Australian history. And if you want a fight about these things, bring it on—bring it on and we will fight and we will fight and we will fight—and we will win.
Thank you.
