Journalist, Alex Johnston
Q: There seems to be a lot of dissatisfaction on the stadium issue. You see comments, you hear it on talk-back radio. Why hasn’t Labor been able to capitalise on that? Is it you’ve got a muddled message on the stadium?
Dean Winter
A: Well, we’ve been focusing on the core issues that Tasmanians keep telling us about: cost of living crisis, health crisis, education, and housing crisis. We’ve been proposing education policies, childcare policies that for working families are telling us is causing them not to be able to go to work and adding to the cost-of-living crisis. We are focused on the priorities of Tasmanians and not on the priorities of Jeremy Rockliff.
Jeremy Rockliff is obsessed by this stadium. This is the only thing that appears to matter to him. What we’re worried about are the priorities of Tasmanians, which is health, housing and cost of living.
Journalist – Alex Johnston
Q: When someone says to you, ‘What’s Labor’s position on the stadium?’ what do you say to them?
Dean Winter
A: We’ve been saying we will renegotiate the deal. We need to renegotiate the deal in the best interest of Tasmanians. Everyone I speak to – no matter what you support – can see that there are serious issues with the deal that Jeremy Rockliff signed. He didn’t take it to Treasury, he didn’t take it to cabinet. And he has left us effectively with a blank cheque to the AFL on this deal. His claim that the $375 million is capped is bogus. He has not capped the cost and there isn’t a private investor ready to walk in because if there was one, they would have announced it by now. There is no idea of who’s going to pay for the stadium. And yet he wants to keep talking about it and obsessing over it. We’re focused on the basics for Tasmanians, which is the health, housing, cost of living crisis.
– Media conference with Dean Winter, March 2024
Having suffered three consecutive election defeats, the young guns of Tasmanian Labor were in no mood to dwell on the substantial gains the party had made, nor the fact that the former majority government had been reduced to do something they said they’d never do.
Not that Labor’s support had risen all that much. Of the parties, only the Greens’ vote had increased. Nevertheless, the post-election knives were out, and the blades were directed at Rebecca White’s decision to campaign on a promise to renegotiate Rockliff’s unsolicited licence agreement with the AFL.
It came as no surprise that White stood down as party leader, but the big surprise – not only for Labor voters but for many within the party – was the new leader’s attempt to neutralise the contentious issue of the Macquarie Point stadium by throwing support behind the project. Big mistake.
Since the election, the groundswell of protests against Rockliff’s billion-plus-dollar Project of State Subservience has only gained momentum, spurred – in no small way – by Labor’s betrayal of those who cast their vote based solely on its promise to renegotiate the AFL’s extortionary deal with the Premier.
The damning independent evidence of the stadium’s contextual scale, its shoehorned boundaries, and its cascading cost is finally being absorbed by the 407 thousand registered voters and taxpayers. Osmosis is, by definition, a slow process, prolonged in this case by a desperate Premier’s insistence on shooting each and every messenger.
Political weakness is a metastasising cancer. In a race to the bottom of public distrust, Dean Winter thinks he has a cunning plan.
Reading between the lines of its press releases, it is obvious Labor is leveraging the government’s appalling mishandling of the berthless $900 million Spirits IV and V, and is prepared to support the construction of the AFL theme park safe in the knowledge that the mismanagement forecast in Dr Nicholas Gruen’s (government-commissioned) Stadium Report would be clarified by the snowballing costs during construction and lead to a change of government.
But by then the die is cast and the money-pit deepens.
It’s very easy (for this writer) to believe Labor’s approach would be successful, but what does it tell every Tasmanian about Dean Winter’s treacherous abuse of ‘Tasmania’s Debt Dilemma’ (Saul Eslake, March 2025) with such a lazy, sloth-like route to government?
And all this for a licence to play just one of the many nationwide games we already play.
Neither of these weak, vainglorious men deserve to lead Tasmania.
According to longtime observers (and backed by recent polling) among all the controversial state issues of the past half-century, the Mac Point Stadium has now become the most divisive since the Gordon-below-Franklin Dam of 1982.
And without the support of a slippery, stand-for-nothing Tasmanian Labor Party, we would see the Premier experiencing that Robin Gray feeling of loneliness.
There is only one means by which to excise the festering sore of the stadium, and that is by a referendum to decide first the proposition – and then further – the location of the AFL’s Trojan Horse. But, please Tasmania, beware of Gaming Geeks bearing gifts.
Mark Pooley is a retired architect living in Hobart.
Editor’s note: right on cue, a briefing paper popped up on Monday at the Hobart City Council workshop. It details significant shortcomings of the MacPoint Stadium POSS application as identified by independent consultants. We have reproduced it below.
Briefing to Hobart Workshop Committee Meeting (Hobart City Council) – Manager Land Use and Development Planning and the Acting Director Strategic and Regulatory Services, 12 March 2025
Macquarie Point Stadium – Project of State Significance
Roderick
March 25, 2025 at 23:05
Thank you, Mark Pooley. Your observations are always interesting. Dean, quite clearly, is not a visionary leader .. much like his political mentor wasn’t.
I am old enough to remember the vibrant new energy of Don Dunstan and Gough Whitlam and Tom Uren – decent Australians with a passion for improving the lives of all Australians. Dean is, as I often say, a clone of Felix Ellis.
What really makes a nation or a state? It is action to improve and educate its citizens, and not pandering to and funding private enterprises. I was born in Tasmania but after many decades all I see are many delusional politicians who basically have little interest in this state’s people. They probably do not want to educate the populace because they then may wake up to the deceptions of their governments.
As much as I like this island state, I often despise it also. From the very dark karmic stains of British colonialism and its treatment of indigenous Tasmanians and the convict culture, I often think that we are governed by many who are not very intelligent.