What’s the Real Cost of the Macquarie Point Stadium?

The proposal for an AFL-stipulated stadium at Macquarie Point is the largest urban proposition in Tasmania’s history. On the weakening assumption that the projected cost can even be afforded by Tasmanians, the question of where the stadium is to be built and how it is enabling, and enabled by the urban condition of Nipaluna/Hobart, demands unimpeachable resolution.

Perhaps by any standard set nationally, Macquarie Point holds immensely compelling civic prospects, but this potential has escaped decades of Tasmanian government- and private-investor-led ambitions for the site.

By 2022, in conjunction with endorsement of the larger vision of a “Truth and Reconciliation Park,” a compelling mixed-use housing development was proposed, but its progress ceased almost immediately, coinciding with the intensification of the government’s negotiation with the AFL for a Tasmanian team. At the close of negotiation in mid-2023, reportedly without cabinet or treasury scrutiny, Tasmanian Premier Jeremy Rockliff personally agreed that a Tasmanian team was to be contingent on the delivery of a league-compliant stadium at Macquarie Point. No stadium, no team.

Macquarie Point was originally the site of disembarkation for colonists, who gouged a vast Muwinina cultural living place and subsequently put the site to heavy industrial use as a rail yard for over a century.

(The state’s Environment Protection Authority has warned that large, unremedied quantities of cyanide, hydrocarbons or volatile organic compounds still lie below the site.)1

Today, the site is by far the largest clear apron offered in Hobart’s cove context.

Even given these metrics, the proposed stadium site is girdled by an immovable perimeter of fine-grained, highly sensitive civic, archaeological, ceremonial and portside interfaces. Proposing for this space an entertainment and sports precinct equivalent in scale to two entire city blocks means that the urban realm – existing and envisaged – will become frontal, narrow and unmediated.

Putting aside the more economical option of adapting existing stadium assets elsewhere in the state, with so much depending on the successful delivery of the stadium for the creation of a team and for the urban opportunity it freights, it begs the question why a development of such unprecedented urban intensity has been proposed for a site as corseted and spatially risk-laden as this?

A proposal of this scale must deliver a compelling proposition of architectural and urban quality for the state.

Instead, the potential for a high-order urban outcome has been compromised because a stadium, which needs spaciousness and networks to properly operate, has been predestined to a location that cannot yield those requirements.

These inconsistencies between scale and site were predetermined and entirely foreseeable, by virtue of the predetermined siting – in its submissions to the Tasmanian Planning Commission’s project of state significance assessment process, which began in September 2024, the Urban Design Advisory Panel (UDAP) for the City of Hobart wrote that: ” … the scale of the stadium and lack of pedestrian permeability across the site due to its footprint, combined with the minimised and compressed adjacent public space on the perimeters of the site overrides any argument that could support the appropriateness of the building type, a stadium, in this location.”2

The UDAP’s submission continued: “The combination of the stadium’s scale … and the tight fit of the stadium’s footprint within the site, has made these impacts impossible for the architects to avoid.”3

Like a perfect storm of compromise, the architecture of the proposal for a stadium at Macquarie Point is forced into an apologetic posture. The design rationale argues that the form of the proposed dome and the EFTE material that clads it, will read as “cloud-like” and “belonging to the sky”.4

That a mass the size of an entire quadrant of the city is conceptualised as a visage of the Tasmanian firmament is telling in its anxiety. There is nothing ephemeral about the inescapable bulk of the proposition in this setting. It is an entire remaking of the headland, and is most directly comparable in magnitude with the geology of Hobart’s Cenotaph mound, which it abuts.

Throughout an exhausting and divisive public debate, amid patronising silence from the AFL, arguments have been run on a binary of people “for” or “against” the project, defined by the government as either “builders” or “blockers.”

Against all this rhetoric, a third question – the most important – remains unasked – what does the setting want to become?

It seems that the primary determinant for the siting of the stadium was proximity to existing commercial opportunity and existing parking and transport that is provided by the city centre.5

Macquarie Point also happens to be an area enmeshed in the Georgian-era grain of the city, between the city centre and the waterfront. It bookends the waterfront with Salamanca – the early nineteenth-century warehouses on the other end of the cove. A stadium here, of this monumental scale, is spatially incongruent with the systemic limits of the setting. No convincing siting feasibility was ever undertaken for viable alternatives, even though far more convincing options do exist, offering more generous and realistic urban prospects.6

Most Tasmanian spectators are projected to approach from the north of the city, and yet key locations to the north of Macquarie Point – such as Cornelian Bay, near existing sports infrastructure, or vast areas of riverside land at Elwick, adjacent an existing smaller arena – were never publicly canvassed as sites prior to the Macquarie Point announcement. Locations that catalyse the creation of proper diversified public transport corridors, which are currently non-existent, have not been advanced either. It is difficult to fathom why such generational spatial advantage has not been more fully leveraged.

The legislation that guides the project of state significance process did not extend the Tasmanian Planning Commission’s remit to consider Macquarie Point’s wider urban realm and how the stadium might affect it – such as the appallingly disrespectfully titled “Aboriginal Culturally Informed Zone” proposed for the precinct. Still with no clear overture to honour Tasmanian Aboriginal people’s truth telling at Macquarie Point – which has been recommended by the government’s commissioned Pathway to Truth-Telling and Treaty – this curious bureaucratic nomenclature is made even more peculiar given the opposition of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre to the Stadium proposal at Macquarie Point.

When it tried, in a March 2025 draft report, to discuss these wider relationships and urban interfaces, Minister for Macquarie Point Urban Renewal Eric Abetz accused the Commission of “erring” in its conduct. The government subsequently attempted to bypass the project of state significance process altogether, but a vote of no confidence in the Premier Jeremy Rockliff and a snap state election stymied that initiative.

On the morning of 17 September 2025, precisely a year after the commission was engaged, it tabled its carefully adjudicated findings and emphatically recommended refusal. That same morning, the state government, against independent expert economic and spatial assessments, announced it would proceed regardless. The project’s ultimate consideration is likely to rest in the hands of a few under-resourced and frustrated independent members of the upper house. The paucity of any expert strategic advice on urban betterment is in part a consequence of the fact that Tasmania has no design review panel for major infrastructure projects, whereas every other state does. So, to date, there has been no unilateral capacity to expertly advocate for design or urban policy. There seems to be a myopic assumption operating where, rather than being strategically enabled through sound urbanism, city-making can only be litigated, haphazardly, into existence.

No genuine civic directive has informed the stadium’s proposed location. That deficit of foresight promises a legacy of urban opacity.

For the last 25 years, Victoria has been trying to ameliorate the failed experiment that is Melbourne’s Docklands Stadium (now Marvel Stadium). Today, in a city of 5 million people and in the heart of football culture, it is widely considered an urban dead zone.

The lack of rationale in determining Macquarie Point as a site for a stadium in a far smaller city, with one-twentieth of the population, will generationally frustrate the city’s delicate urban relationship with the history and grain of its riverfront.

The relationship between contextual integrity and community sanctioning is often misapprehended in the procurement of public projects on this island. When civic sites are engaged at this scale, the urban approach requires unassailable spatial testing and community support, not the government’s tin ear. Without more vociferous architectural or urban influence over spatial policy in Tasmania, the integrity of determining where civic infrastructure should be proposed will always be in question. Architectural and urban quality will certainly not manifest because lawyers and politicians try to post-justify the wrong choice of site with hyperbole.

Demanding that places yield through political stealth is an attitude with a colonial hangover.

In the new Tasmania, depending how a place is asked what it wants to become, determines whether the architectural muse enters the dialogue, or departs it.

Mat Hinds is a Tasmanian Architect and the Director of Taylor and Hinds Architects. His practice has twice received the nations highest architectural awards in cultural heritage, and has been nominated for the Swiss Architectural Prize and the Royal Academy Dorfman Award. He was called as an expert witness to the Public Accounts Committee, about the proposition for a Stadium at Macquarie Point.

This article was first published by the national professional media, ArchitectureAU regarding the Stadium proposal at Macquarie Point. https://architectureau.com/articles/Whats-the-real-cost-of-the-Macquarie-Point-stadium/ 

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