Andrew Wilkie:
Our next speaker is Craig Garland. Now, Craig is a fisherman and a passionate environmentalist. He was elected as the independent member for Braddon in the House of Assembly in 2024. Now, although I understand Craig does now possess a suit, there’s no risk, no risk whatsoever, of Craig ever forgetting his roots or failing to bring powerful common sense to governance in the state.
Craig Garland:
I might start by saying that the AFL has been pissing me off forever. Not only have they tampered with our rules, they’ve gone into Greater Western Sydney, the Gold Coast – not traditional football heartlands. This state here has given the best footballers in the nation and they’ve given a great lot of enjoyment to all of those people on the mainland.
Now the other things I’ve been hearing are the justifications for this stadium, and they’re quite absurd. One is that the 18 presidents of the other football clubs voted on giving us a side on the contingency of a roofed stadium. Nowhere else in the country has that happened. So for the benefit of half of those AFL sides to come down here and play under a roofed stadium because it’s too cold, it’s too wet. For God’s sake, it’s a winter sport!
The other one is that the high profile footballers like Buddy Franklin, if they were based in Launceston, the first thing they’d be doing after the game is jumping in a taxi and coming down to Hobart – in the big capital. Well, if they’re the sort of player that we’re trying to recruit to represent our state, they’re not the ones we want. And there are plenty of footballers in this state that would walk across broken glass just to represent this state. I know. I was a footballer. I had a fishing rod in one hand and a football in the other for my whole life. I worshipped football. It was everything to me. The community – 4000 people would roll up to the oval at Wynyard when I was a kid. We had to sit on the bike track.
You know, what they’ve done to football is disgusting, it’s shocking, and to put us in this situation, to hold us over a barrel, to say I will give you a side as long as you throw yourself into heaps more debt and build a stadium that no one wants, that is absurd.
I’d like to highlight too, before the AFL went into Launceston, it was the poorest recruiting area in the country. Within a short time frame it became one of the richest and still is today. What it means to be able to go along and watch your stars play on that oval and then go along to your local club, commit yourself … football is all about application and opportunity.
Basing this stadium down here is denying the NorthWest Coast that access to get caught up and wrapped up in that affordable afternoon’s entertainment that everybody should be able to do on a Saturday. So they’re not thinking about the NW. For us to come down here … the other day I had to, I was a bit late booking a room. The two rooms that I could get, one was $840, the other was $500. They expect us NW coasters, the most marginal electorate in this state, to come up with thousands of dollars just to come down here to watch football? That is wrong. It is basically wrong. And Jeremy Rockliff, being a NW coaster, should be ashamed of himself.
I don’t know really what else to say except to the AFL to stop stuffing us around, stop dividing this community. Let’s use York Park. We’ve got the existing stadium there. We’re not asking people to come down and play on gravel. We want our side. For all those young people out there that haven’t got a job, haven’t got a direction, a football club will feed you, it will take you in, you’ll mix with other people and if you apply yourself and you’re given that opportunity, anyone on this planet can be a footballer. I know that whether you’re short, thin, dark, smart, stupid, there is a place for everyone on the Australian Rules football field.
Let’s get it right. Let’s start right now. We can start tomorrow. We can start playing in that stadium up there at York Park. So what if you can’t get parking down here at Bellerive? Work around it, you know, all these things. It’s not a perfect world and if you’re looking for perfection at every angle, you won’t go anywhere. So give us our stadium, give our young opportunity to get caught up in that hype and and progress their lives. Thank you.
Andrew Wilkie:
You know the toughest job in politics at the federal, state and local level is to find yourself the speaker after Richard Flanagan. But didn’t he rise to the occasion?