A group of doctors sits together after a meeting in Hobart, talking about living and working in Tasmania, what we need, what we want, what we don’t want. What our patients need and want.
No-one said a stadium or even an AFL team. What we agreed was that all we hear is that there is no money.
Late last year, at a special doctors’ briefing, economist Saul Eslake spoke on the woeful state of Tasmania’s finances. He said that the deterioration in Tasmania’s public sector finances is entirely the result of conscious decisions to increase spending and cut taxes.
We are borrowing more and more money, that must be paid back with interest (big numbers) even though we have other expenses like unfunded superannuation and much else that is on the books in plain view.
We are doctors, we like working with facts. We rely on research that has been reviewed by experts in their fields to make the best decisions we can. We know a lot about wishful thinking and denial and human behaviour. We know about choices and consequences.
For Tasmanians, things are already tough. In this state, we are older, sicker, more spread out than in other states, and half of us can barely read. Fewer of us have jobs, we work fewer hours and for each hour we work, we produce less.
And we don’t have deep pockets. Our Tasmanian government spends $880 less per person per year on services than other states on average.
We get less back for our minerals and there are other options for increasing our finances that we don’t use.
Instead of following responsible evidence-based management to be solvent, our government is looking at selling off bits of the farm. To build a stadium. And a high-performance sports centre in Kingston, now $105 million, and pay the club one million dollars monthly for 12 years and all cost over-runs, and associated infrastructure spend. So we can have a Tasmanian-labelled AFL team.
The world is changing and the ‘business as usual’ premise of much of planning is unrealistic, even if our government respected due planning process, which it does not. Supply chains are not secure, and geopolitical uncertainty isn’t going away.
The academic consensus view appears to be that promises of benefits made before a stadium is built are followed by studies after that reveal mainly losses, often including a shift in spending, eg from the north of the state to Hobart.
A constant stream of new major events cannot be guaranteed, and there are no examples of such an ambitious project in place as small as Hobart.
We needs houses so we need our supply of builders available.
We need our planned hospital infrastructure upgraded now, not pushed back to an unfunded completion date of 2050.
We have unprecedented levels of truancy in our struggling education sector. We need targeted, evidence-based early interventions, not expensive ‘tough on crime’ and ‘adult crime, adult time’ measures that research tells us don’t work. Ashley Youth Detention Centre still needs replacing.
Climate change will bring us more fires, storms, floods, droughts, sea level rise and storm surges, and all their associated costs. Insurance premiums will continue to climb and insurance may simply not be unavailable for some properties. The safety net will be the government, state and federal, and that will be expensive.
Then there is ecological collapse, pollution, plastic and waste – talking of which, exactly where is that massive tonnage of contaminated soil and water from Macquarie Point going to and how is it now safe?
Tasmania’s salmon industry as it is will not be viable in the near future because our water will be too warm. Aluminium smelting is in doubt at Bell Bay, and when the decrepit Nyrstar plant closes, who will pay for the remediation of the contamination of that site?
There will be another pandemic – it might already be on its way. The state of our environment, according to a recent report, is mostly ‘poor’ and nearly everything is ‘getting worse’.
Our government should be putting money aside for all these predictable demands right now, not emptying the budget for a passion project held in blind faith, and without limits, and subject to an unreasonable stadium demand.
Yes team, No stadium makes more sense to us.
No-one will die if we continue to use the two good stadiums we already have. We should be able to have our AFL team without bankrupting ourselves. But people will suffer and die if we don’t look after our community and our island home, because we have spent more money than we actually had on a roofed stadium.
The cupboard is bare, so what do we want – toys or food?
Tasmanian Doctors for the Environment is the local branch of Doctors for the Environment Australia. The group includes GPs, specialists and doctor working the health system as administrators and academics.
This article was lead-authored Dr Clare Smith (GP) on behalf of the group.
Tasmanian Times (TT) is a community-based news and current affairs service covering the island state of Tasmania. It exists to provide a diverse view of Tasmanian issues. TT creates and supports independent media content utilising the best of modern technologies and tried-and-true practices of public-interest journalism.
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