Andrew Wilkie:
Vica Bayley is of course one of Tasmania’s leading environmental activists and has been for many, many years. In 2023 he was elected on a count back to the House of Assembly following the resignation of Cassie O’Connor and Vica was re-elected in 2024, and since 2024 he has served as the Deputy Greens leader.
Vica Bayley:
Well, thank you Andrew, and thank you also to Our Place for organising today’s meeting and to all of you today for coming along or tuning in.
This is indeed a defining issue for today with implications for decades to come. The cost of this stadium will be passed from generation to generation, as will the worsening health, education and housing issues that continue under-addressed as our government and our taxpayer dollars are focused on a vanity project we neither want or need.
Could I start by acknowledging you meet on the lands of the Muwinina people who did not survive invasion and whose rights, hopes and aspirations live on through the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. I pay my respects to Palawa Elders past and present.
The Mac Point Stadium has many facets that leave me shaking my head with shock, scratching it for logic, or hanging it deeply in shame. The treatment of those Aboriginal hopes and aspirations and their investment in a physical space that can serve as a memorial and a symbol for making things right, is one of the lowest and the saddest. The Truth and Reconciliation park, once planned for Mac Point, combined prominence, scale, accessibility and connection to create a space for remembrance, celebration, learning and hope. Now, exchanged for greed, this opportunity and the people working to achieve it, have been demoted. Now an Aboriginal culturally-informed zone is to be jammed between a highway and a stadium, with some of its paltry area further eroded between the publication of the draft and the final stadium master plans – swapped out for cricket nets.
But what should we expect? If Premier Rockcliff cannot even consult his own cabinet, his Treasury or the Tasmanian people about a Mac Point stadium before inking a dud deal with the AFL, including liability for every dollar of inevitable cost overruns, why would we think the agreed development master plan with its housing, science, heritage, and Truth and Reconciliation would carry any weight? Indeed, in ditching that plan to get to this point so the land would stay vacant, we the taxpayer have paid out a Melbourne-based developer to not deliver housing on one part of the site.
This is a true Tasmanian tragedy in the suite of Tasmanian land use tragedies. I, like many of you, have been involved in numerous land use conflicts where we, the community, battle to combat inappropriate private development on public land. Choppers, canal developments, cable car, zip line. The list is long, ongoing and the common theme is the values of the land and the fact that it should not be developed at all. But we all agree, I reckon to a person, that Mac Point is a huge opportunity as a brownfields development site on the doorstep of the CBD and within a stone’s throw of the waterfront. It’s just a matter of getting it right, and the stadium was wrong from the start. But here we are. Here we are – tragedy, yes, but now our reality. Our reality, together with the worst education results of any Australian state, a housing crisis has an ever-growing wait list with people waiting longer and longer for their human rights to be met and a healthcare crisis where the stories are harrowing and the costly impact significant on patients and healthcare workers alike. This plus a budget that will see the deficit for the current year blow out by $500 million to $1.3 billion and public debt grow to a staggering $9.6 billion by 2028, costing us, you the taxpayer, $500 million each year in interest payments.
Dr Nicholas Gruen’s independent analysis of Mac Point Stadium was sobering reading and seemed not even read by the Liberal and Labor Parties, dismissed outright or with deafening silence. Already displaying the hallmarks of mismanagement and likely to cost well over a billion dollars, Dr Gruen deconstructed both the cost estimates and the process, and his condemnation was clear.
Meanwhile, just recently, in response to a request from the Planning Commission, another drop of project documents rings alarm bell after alarm bell about the traffic, pedestrian and heritage costs, and other critical issues that the Planning Commission and the Parliament categorically reject this project. Despite so-called mitigation by landscaping measures, impact on protected sight lines at the Cenotaph is confirmed as high to very high. It calculates that the (until now uncosted) expense of moving the Goods Shed at $6.5 million, an underestimate according to Dr Gruen.
It confirms the abandonment of enabling infrastructure like the Collins Street pedestrian bridge, meaning pedestrian safety on the existing Davey St footpath would require, and I quote “an additional 6.2 metres, meaning the existing parking bays plus traffic lane” on Davey St. Transport stats rely on active transport, including the Greater Hobart Cycling Plan, but Eric Abetz has got it in for bike lanes. On game day, if you’re travelling from the Eastern Shore, the Tasman Bridge will exceed capacity, and that’s from information that the government did provide. On other Commission requests for additional info, it got the middle finger, the Mac Point Development Corporation either arguing the toss or pointing to existing reports.
While the Project of State Significance process is not community friendly and is stacked in favour of the developer by abandoning long-standing planning rules, we’re heartened by the Planning Commission’s push for more info. Given what’s been delivered or not, it’s impossible to envisage a credible process giving approval to this stadium.
But then it’s over to us in the Parliament. On that, can I acknowledge the work of my colleagues in Parliament, both those on the stage and in the audience, including my Green colleagues Cassie, Rosalie, Helen and Senator Nick Mckim, who’s used his position in Canberra to push for transparency on the federal contribution and its GST status.
Tassie deserves a footy team and we have done for decades. There is no national competition without us. We have stadiums where AFL has been played for years. We don’t need another one. We’ve one of the oldest, sickest, least literate and least secure populations in the country, liable for sky-rocketing debt and more economic shocks to come, we simply cannot afford a stadium. We can’t afford to be blackmailed by the AFL.
The stadium is in the wrong place and it comes from the wrong place. If those land use conflicts have demonstrated one thing, it’s that Tasmanians will defend their place, stand up for their children’s inheritance and back right before wrong. The stadium is a dud, done badly with dire consequences and that’s why we, collectively, will defeat it. Thank you.
Andrew Wilkie:
Thank you, Vica, you’re a gem and I didn’t waste my vote.