You can watch Shamus’ presentation here or read the transcript below.
My name’s Shamus Mulcahy and I’m a practising Tasmanian architect. I was past president of the Tasmanian Chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects. In this role I worked on facilities for the London 2012 Olympic Games.
I want to talk about three things quickly: the previously released Macquarie Point vision, estimating likely stadium costs and methodologies, and I’ll touch on some of the greater impacts.
This vision was undertaken by Bence Mulcahy for Our Place. It was an alternative proposal for Macquarie Point and was designed to preference housing and community use as a social and economic reality for that site. It’s a spatial, social and economic model for the site and it seeks to address the issues that face our community today. It relies on projects on that site of a scale that focuses entirely and explicitly on the skills of the Tasmanian building industry. It addresses the gap in supply of the missing middle-density housing stock, which the Government has itself identified as desperately undersupplied.
This project, this vision, is about building community. It proposes uses that provide perpetual and sustained economic activity for the whole year, 24/7. It stands as an absolute counterpoint to a singular dominating corporate use on that site. It does not rely on Tier 1 mainland contractors or mainland lead consultants with token appointments for optics. The construction industry needs sustained and targeted spending on projects that directly benefit small-, medium-, and large-scale Tasmanian businesses, not a singular megaproject where so much of the economic benefits flow offshore.
A singular large project will periodically spike specific economic statistics but does not result in sustainable economic security for the industry. I draw everyone’s attention to the current Bridgewater bridge. If you visit building sites and talk to builders on a day-to-day basis, the industry is doing it tough. That project is only halfway through at its absolute maximum, yet the industry suffers.
The facts with the stadium are that only a handful of Tier 1 contractors from the mainland will be capable of undertaking this project. Specialist expertise and a significant interstate workforce will be sourced from the mainland to deliver a stadium of this scale. The vast majority of construction materials will be procured from interstate suppliers simply due to the bulk nature of the materials, finishes and fittings required.
The Government and the appointed interstate lead architects will no doubt pursue a timber-focused solution to the stadium structure. This will sap the industry of structural timber supply and result in less efficient higher structures which will magnify the already appalling bulk promised by the scale of this proposition on a site that is already too small to hold it.
The Government’s cost for this stadium is considered by many in our industry to be humorously inadequate. There are methods for estimating likely spend with large, complex projects and complex levels of risk that rely on precedence to establish the relative cost.
The table shows comparative project costs. I am using the widely accepted methodology of comparative assessment developed by Bent Flyvbjerg that Richard mentioned. The way you estimate complex megaprojects like this broadly when not a lot of information is available is to simply look at precedence and they do it on a wide scale. I’ve just done it on a very quick scale for everyone here. You develop a mean and you analyse your project against the mean and make assessments of the risk of yours and the complexity of yours against the mean.
First, using this is a very simplified version for the start. I’m not able to find any stadium of the size that is proposed at Mac Point with a glazed roof anywhere in the world. This table I’ve made lists relatively recently constructed stadiums but with a focus towards stadiums with roofs and stadiums in countries where the construction industry and wage structures are similar to ours. I’ve listed them chronologically. I haven’t listed them in costs and it’s not a complete listing. I have dropped out quite a few US stadiums that sit in the middle to upper bracket of $1 billion to $2 billion and I’ve done that simply to make it not too US-centric and show a broader global context.
AFL stadiums exist: we know that. There are some non-AFL stadiums with roofs and there are even some non-AFL stadiums with glazed roofs, but what’s proposed by the State Government does not exist in total anywhere in the world. Without this background, the reality suggests that there’s unprecedented levels of spatial and economic risk that need to be managed as part of this project.
You’re going to ask me where I think our stadium sits in terms of costs. I just want to talk to the table a little bit and point out a few things. If you look at SoFi Stadium, when you look at these things, capacity is not a direct indication of cost. Ultimately, what’s more of an indication of cost is the scale of the field and particularly with a roofed stadium because that’s what you have to span.
I want to drop the outliers out so we can look at what might be a mean here. I want to drop out SoFi Stadium, let’s ignore that. It is a really good example. It’s quite recent, it’s 2020 and it’s got a fixed glazed roof, so it ticks a lot of boxes. I wanted to be fair about this. It is an outlier simply because of the cost, $5.5 billion US, and the sting in the tail is it’s an NFL-sized stadium so it’s only 110 metres long and 49 metres wide. Compare that with what we’re proposing, an AFL size. You’ll notice the one at the top is an AFL one, the Gabba, so you compare the scale. I also want to drop out the one at the bottom which our stadium is compared against the lot. It’s the Dunbar Stadium in Dunedin, New Zealand. It’s $200 million. It’s a rugby size, much smaller than what we’re proposing, in a city not much bigger than Launceston. Look at it: it is a metal shed akin to Creek Rd Netball Centre but a little bit larger. It’s not comparable to what we are doing, so look at what’s left and then start to draw your eyes up some of the cost values.
The mean here for a stadium is approximately $1.8 billion, which is in line with what people are saying and what I’ve been hearing. The scary thing about this is there are very few in this list that barrel out under $1.5 billion and most of them are 15 to 20 years old. Then ask yourself what’s left. Most of them start to hit the $1.9 billion to $2 billion mark and none of them yet are AFL sized: they’re all much smaller. I don’t think that level of risk is being considered in this project at all. The closest thing that I think hits the mark is probably Marvel Stadium but it’s 24 years old.
I want to talk about this image that we produced. Everyone’s probably seen it. I just want to talk to how it was made. This image precisely and mathematically depicts the promised scale of the current Government proposal for the stadium. We do this on a daily basis, using software.
We make a model of the size and shape of the stadium based upon the Government’s information. We take a standard image, photograph from a point – in this case, Victoria Dock.
We use the computer. We take an image of the model from the same location and that’s just maths. Then, using computer software, we blend the two. We effectively overlay them over each other. Why this is accurate is simply because this is very easy. The Government, the stadium, the data available from the Government was the location, which was quite easily drawn on a plan of Macquarie Point. It’s 240 m long, 210 m wide and 40 m high. There’s only three inputs; it’s that simple. And that’s why it’s accurate.
We also took the same model and applied it to other parts around Hobart. We haven’t released all those images, but here’s just one. It’s obvious where this is from. It was produced using the same methodology. It precisely references the topography and the government-supplied heights. This image clearly demonstrates the devastating impact that the stadium will have on the most important ceremonial spaces of our city. As a professional, these impacts are utterly unacceptable. They’re irreconcilable with the spatial reality, and the scale and the history of this area.
We also took the same model and applied it to other parts around Hobart. We haven’t released all those images, but here’s just one. It’s obvious where this is from. It was produced using the same methodology. It precisely references the topography and the government-supplied heights. This image clearly demonstrates the devastating impact that the stadium will have on the most important ceremonial spaces of our city. As a professional, these impacts are utterly unacceptable. They’re irreconcilable with the spatial reality, and the scale and the history of this area.