A long-time critic of the project, Federal Senator Jacqui Lambie has consistently argued that Tasmania cannot afford the stadium and that the funds would be better spent on housing, health and education.
Media release – Jacqui Lambie, independent Senator for Tasmania, 19 September 2025
On Wednesday the Tasmanian Planning Commission (TPC) released their report on the proposed AFL stadium at Macquarie Point in Hobart.
This report confirms again what every independent expert has been telling us and what most Tasmanians know in their guts – we can’t afford it and it’s in the wrong place.
You would have thought the Premier would take this opportunity to tell the AFL that we need to renegotiate this terrible deal. We deserve a team and we should have had one years ago.
It’s particularly grinding my gears this week, because the Hobart Clinic, Tassie’s only large-scale private mental health clinic, is closing, our health system is on its knees and our literacy rate is still going backwards! We just can’t afford this stadium especially when we have a perfectly good one at York Park in Launceston.
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What really blows me away is that ten minutes after the Planning Commission published their report, the Premier was on social media thanking the TPC commissioners and telling Tasmanians he was going to go ahead anyway because apparently ‘this is bigger than politics’.
The problem is that it’s bad politics that got us into this mess in the first place. There was an election coming up, and they wanted to say they were the government that got Tasmania a team! It was a handshake deal, not run by the treasury and with no viable business case.
Thank God we have some independent MPs in the Tasmanian upper house. I hope they can find the courage that Premier Rockliff lacks.
Let’s hope they can stop this and do what all elected representatives are supposed to do – make decisions in the best interests of Tasmanians!
Image courtesy Philip Bohle.
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