Andrew Wilkie:
The next speaker is Richard Flanagan. Richard is obviously one of Tasmania’s leading intellectuals and, according to The Economist, is considered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation. Indeed, his novels are published in at least 42 countries and he has received numerous literary honours for his works, including the Commonwealth Prize, the MAN Booker Prize and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Fiction. Moreover, and you may not be as well aware of this, as a journalist, Richard has written for many national and international publications, including Le Monde, The New York Times and The New Yorker. In other words, Richard thinks big and understands stuff like few others.
Richard Flanagan:
Thank you Andrew and it’s an honour to be on this stage with such doughty fighters for Tasmania and Tasmanians. The Premier likes dismissing those who are opposed to the stadium as anti jobs. I am not anti jobs; I am anti lies. The truth is that the stadium was always going to cost far, far more than the Premiers lie of a $375 million cap, that it was never going to employ thousands and it was never going to be a boon to Tasmania. The truth is that Tasmanians are already being sacked to pay for this stadium with the so called efficiency dividend, as the crisis in health, education, housing and policing worsens daily because of the ever more destructive attempts by the government to balance its collapsing budget with the need to pay for an ever more expensive stadium.
Dr Nicholas Gruen exposed the truth behind the lies. The stadium will cost a minimum $1.1 billion and more likely, as he shows, as much as $1.7 billion, with a net return to Tasmanians of just $0.44 in the dollar. In the contract Jeremy Rockliff so recklessly signed with the AFL, Clause 21.4 clearly and directly specifies Tasmanian taxpayers are responsible for all cost overruns. We Tasmanian taxpayers are up for every last cent owing, no matter how much this stadium blows out. Put this into context. Tasmania’s budget this year is $9.7 billion. Tasmania’s total debt is projected to blow out, according to budget papers cited by Dr Gruen, to over $17 billion within the next two years. There is no pot of gold to build this stadium, no endless treasure chest. Just a financial situation that is disastrous. Worse, as Saul Eslake’s report made clear, the only solution is cuts in public services and more taxes. That’s stadium job cuts. That’s stadium taxes every Tasmanian will be paying. Nor are there the thousands of jobs the Premier routinely lies about being created in construction and which his official echo chamber ‘dreaming Dean Winter’ consistently repeats. Even his own consultant, Left Field Project Solutions, here on page 13 admits that at the peak of construction the stadium will have a workforce of just 400, half of whom will be mainlanders. The report finds that this will push Hobart rents up by 1.1%. Not new homes being built at Mac Point as should be, but a housing crisis worsened. Not more Tasmanians working, but Tasmanians losing their jobs for mainlanders. If there’s a 50% illiteracy rate in Tasmania, there is clearly a 100% illiteracy rate in the Tasmanian Liberal government. Because they don’t seem to have read Gruen. They don’t even read their own consultant’s report. Here is this from stadium consultant KPMG’s latest report and you can find it on page 15 – it says “if existing schools and hospitals are insufficient to meet the needs of Tasmanians, the benefits of building a new school or hospital will be very large and almost certainly larger than the benefits of an equivalent investment in a stadium”. That’s the Premier’s own economic consultant. Page 15 – read it, read it, Mr Rockliff, read it!
That the Premier, with the glee of an adolescent online shopping with his parents’ credit card, bought a stadium doesn’t make his purchase wise or right. The AFL deal is a Trumpian cruelty, imposed by an AFL that doesn’t care, and signed by a premier who doesn’t think. The stadium eats Tasmania’s very future. It is a destroyer of our society if it is allowed to go ahead. Now Jeremy Rockcliff, the Elmer Fudd of Tasmanian politics, has to decide if AFL CEO Andrew Dillon is the Premier of Tasmania, or if he is. But this is a weak premier, this is a cowardly premier, this is a deceitful premier who from the beginning has not had the courage to tell the Tasmanian people the truth about the stadium.
Every day I walk the Domain past homeless people and I am ashamed to be Tasmanian. Every day I hear stories of people suffering because we have the worst and worsening health system in the nation and I am ashamed. I’m a Booker Prize winner and there is a 50% illiteracy rate and I am ashamed. And I’m most ashamed that the only answer our government can make to any of these terrible problems that it should be addressing is the immense folly of a stadium that will only worsen all Tasmanians’ lives in its disastrous financial consequences.
We need someone in the Liberal government with the courage of these people sitting here next to me, with the guts to say to the AFL: we Tasmanians run Tasmania, not the AFL. To say the truth: we cannot afford this stadium. To say to the AFL: we will decide if and when a stadium will be built. We will decide what sort of stadium we will build and we will decide where the stadium is sited and until a time that will be of our choosing, you will not take our team from us. Our team will play at our two existing stadia and we’re supporting that team with the most generous state support of any sporting team in Australian history. And if you want a fight about these things, bring it on. Bring it on, because we will fight and we will fight and we will fight and we will win. Thank you.
Andrew Wilkie:
Thank you, Richard.