Karen Brown Photography
Kerry Packer, who sold the Nine Network to Alan Bond for $1 billion only to buy it back for $250 million, famously remarked that you only get one Alan Bond in your life. Gil McLachlan must have felt something similar on meeting Tasmanian Liberal premier Jeremy Rockliff.
Without cabinet, treasury or parliamentary backing, Rockliff, a potato farmer from North West Tasmania, agreed to then AFL boss McLachlan’s demand that the price Tasmania had to pay for its own AFL team was a new stadium built in the middle of Hobart, at taxpayers’ expense, a condition that has never been made of any other state entering the competition. The AFL – those same geniuses who gave the world AFLX – rammed the point home in a slogan: “No stadium, no team”.
The button below will take you to the published article where some readers may get caught up with a paywall.
The island of white elephants, and leaders without backbones. Why cannot our Premier (or opposition leader) stand up to the AFL, and stand up for Tasmania? What is wrong with them? The Premier should step up or step down #nonewstadium
— Roland Browne (@slowguns.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 8:53 AM
[image or embed]