ELLEN COULTER, REPORTER:\u00a0After a year of assessment, a long-awaited report into the proposed Hobart stadium isn\u2019t pretty.<\/p>\n
CASSY O\u2019CONNOR, TAS. GREENS MLC:\u00a0 It\u2019s an utterly damning report.<\/p>\n
PROF. JOHN MADDEN, VICTORIA UNIVERSITY:\u00a0 It\u2019s not surprising at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ELLEN COULTER:\u00a0 The controversial roofed stadium is a pre-requisite of Tasmania getting an AFL and AFLW team.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the state\u2019s Planning Commission has recommended the Macquarie Point project should not proceed.<\/p>\n
CASSY O\u2019CONNOR:\u00a0 Such a damning report. It finds what Tasmanians in their guts, know, that it’s the wrong project on the wrong site at a cost that they can’t bear and they don’t want their children and grandchildren to bear.<\/p>\n
ELLEN COULTER:\u00a0 The commission found the project represents a significant net cost and would diminish the economic welfare of Tasmanians as a whole.\u00a0<\/p>\n
JOHN MADDEN:\u00a0 So, the key point from this report is that an AFL stadium is not justified in terms of the benefit cost ratio. That the benefits from a new stadium are only about 45 per cent of the cost of building a new stadium. On those kinds of basis, a government should seriously consider if they should go ahead with such a venture.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ELLEN COULTER:\u00a0 The Planning Commission estimates the cost to construct the stadium equates to about $4,000 per Tasmanian household and state taxes would need to be raised by $50 million a year to pay it off over 30 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It also found the size, shape and location of the site is ill-suited to a building like the stadium \u2013 a singular, large, bulky monolith which will overwhelm those surrounding buildings and the setting.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Professor John Madden has done economic modelling on major sporting events including the Sydney Olympics.\u00a0<\/p>\n
JOHN MADDEN:\u00a0 The literature has looked at quite a few stadiums in America and the general story there is that the returns, the benefits are pretty well outweighed by the costs. And .45 is probably a little worse than some of the others.<\/p>\n
ELLEN COULTER:\u00a0 Just weeks after winning a snap election partly prompted by Tasmania\u2019s dire state budget, Premier Jeremy Rockliff is unfazed by the report.<\/p>\n
JEREMY ROCKLIFF, TAS. PREMIER:\u00a0 All the issues around noise, around transport, around safety can all be addressed. We vehemently disagree with the economic analysis; it\u2019s been massively underestimated in terms of the social and economic value of this project.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ELLEN COULTER:\u00a0 And he\u2019s revealed the latest cost estimate for the stadium is even higher than the figure the Planning Commission was working off.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s gone from an original figure of $715 million to $775 million to $945 million in May and is now at $1.13 billion.\u00a0<\/p>\n
JOHN MADDEN:\u00a0 I would think that whatever they’re estimating now is likely to be very much at the bottom end of what it ends up costing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ELLEN COULTER:\u00a0 The Commonwealth and AFL will contribute to the stadium, but Tasmania needs to cover the vast majority of the cost.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Will taxes be raised at all to help pay for stadium?<\/p>\n
JEREMY ROCKLIFF:\u00a0 No<\/p>\n
ELLEN COULTER:\u00a0 Unequivocally, no?<\/p>\n
JEREMY ROCKLIFF:\u00a0 No.\u00a0<\/p>\n
CASSY O\u2019CONNOR:\u00a0 He hasn’t been clear that it’s Tasmanians who pay for this, it’s Tasmanians who’ll be saddled with the debt, with the extra taxes or the cuts to services, because while the Premier can say now there’ll be no taxes to pay for this, in all likelihood he won’t be premier when the chickens for this project come home to roost.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ELLEN COULTER:\u00a0Despite the scathing report, the Premier is ploughing ahead with the project.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He\u2019ll bring an order to parliament this year giving MPs the final say on whether the stadium goes ahead.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Labor Opposition has been supporting a stadium but now say they will consider the report and there are no guarantees in the Upper House, where some independents remain undecided.\u00a0<\/p>\n
JEREMY ROCKLIFF:\u00a0 My passion and my commitment to this project, to the Tasmanian Devils, and the aspirations of our young people has only strengthened my resolve as a result of the report today. We can do this.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ELLEN COULTER:\u00a0 While the project\u2019s future hinges on the next couple of months in Parliament, the team isn\u2019t waiting and has been deep in discussions with a potential future coach for its entry into the 2028 season.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The AFL wants the stadium ready for 2029.<\/p>\n
JEREMY ROCKLIFF:\u00a0 We will ensure we will get this done; we will build this stadium.\u00a0<\/p>\n
CASSY O\u2019CONNOR:\u00a0 A premier who is thinking clearly who had the kind of net debt scenario that Tasmania has, would see this report as a lifeline and an opportunity to backtrack, go off to the AFL, renegotiate the deal so we keep our teams, but we aren’t broken by this folly of a project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ELLEN COULTER, REPORTER:\u00a0After a year of assessment, a long-awaited report into the proposed Hobart stadium isn\u2019t pretty. CASSY…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150110,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,12804,7170,85,8824,2801],"class_list":{"0":"post-150109","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-afl","8":"tag-afl","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-australian-football-league","12":"tag-australianfootballleague","13":"tag-hobart","14":"tag-rockliff","15":"tag-sports","16":"tag-stadium","17":"tag-tasmania"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150109\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}