Tasmanians are counting the cost of the Macquarie Point Stadium project and the bill keeps growing.
The Tasmanian government has confirmed it paid $3.3 million in legal fees to barristers and mainland law firm MinterEllison during last year’s Macquarie Point Stadium public hearings. The fees were incurred as part of the Tasmanian Planning Commission’s independent assessment of the project under Project of State Significance legislation, conducted across multiple days in June and July 2025.
Rather than draw on the state’s own legal resources, the government engaged two barristers and top Melbourne silk, Christopher Townshend KC, to represent its position before the TPC panel. When asked to justify the extraordinary expense, a government spokesperson said the proposal’s scale was “well beyond the business as usual resources of Crown law”. This is a remarkable admission that raises serious questions about the complexity and risk the government itself saw in this project.
But the $3.3 million figure may only tell part of the story. As Our Place’s Roland Browne has pointed out, when you factor in airfares and the battery of expert witnesses brought in for the hearings, the true cost to taxpayers could be closer to $4 million. That’s an enormous sum for a process the government would later reject.
The timing of that expensive legal showcase was no coincidence. The TPC hearings fell squarely during the lead-up to the July 2025 state election. The government used the hearings to project its pro-stadium narrative to the media, regardless of what the TPC ultimately found. As Browne noted on Bluesky, the government never truly cared what result the TPC came up with as the spectacle itself was the point.
What’s worse is that this big spend on lawyers/experts and the flashy show at the TPC in June 2025 was all part of the govt’s July 2025 election campaign. They projected all their guff to the TPC, and the media reported it. And, the gov’t didn’t care what result the TPC came up with #nonewstadium
— Roland Browne (@slowguns.bsky.social) 22 April 2026 at 11:01
[image or embed]
Sure enough, the TPC found the proposed stadium was too big for the Macquarie Point site, and that its benefits were outweighed by its drawbacks. The government pressed on anyway.
This is what it looks like when a government treats public money and public process as props for a political campaign. Tasmanians deserved better than a $4 million election stunt — and they deserve better now.
The stadium fight is far from over, but the public is already paying for it. And we have no idea what the total bill will be!
Please contribute to our crowdfunder to engage respected, independent economist Dr Nicholas Gruen to help Tasmanians uncover the truth about how much the Mac Point stadium project will really cost.