Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, in a move reminiscent of his predecessor Scott Morrison in its tone-deaf hubris, is reportedly flying to Tasmania the weekend to announce critical federal funding of $240 million towards a new $715 million state government-funded football stadium in Hobart, a populist call that is wildly unpopular among many Tasmanians.
The stadium proposal is now opposed by everyone from the RSL to the Greens, Jacqui Lambie, Andrew Wilkie, almost the entirety of the state’s Liberal federal MPs and the Tasmanian ALP. In a state where footy was once part of the sweetness of community life, the sport is dying, with only 20 clubs left in the south. Much of the blame is laid at the feet of an arrogant AFL, whose demand for a stadium is eroding what passion remains for a Tasmanian team.
An artist’s impression of the new sporting stadium to be built in Hobart.
Tasmania, and its population of 550,000 people, has two stadiums where AFL games are routinely played. Tasmania doesn’t have a stadium problem. It has a housing and homelessness problem.
Tasmanian rents have increased 45 per cent in the past five years, the highest increase in the nation in the poorest state with the lowest incomes. According to Anglicare, in Tasmania there are no affordable properties available at all for those on Youth Allowance and JobSeeker, and a single parent with two children could afford less than 1 per cent of three-bedroom rentals, even if they were working full-time on the minimum wage.
Charlie Burton, the chief executive of community services body Tascoss, says Hobart has had the highest increase in homelessness in Australia since the last census, a situation worsened by Hobart being the most unaffordable capital city in Australia in terms of everyday living expenses. According to Burton, families now live in tents and cars, a situation apparent to anyone wandering the parks and byways of Hobart.
The stadium has become a symbol of government inaction on these issues that blight Australia’s smallest state. In addition to housing, it has Australia’s worst public health system, and, with 50 per cent illiteracy, a public education problem. And while there seems to be only very limited public money and political will to address these issues, there seems to be no problem in ponying up hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars for a new stadium. A bullying AFL is seen to have blackmailed a weak Liberal state government into agreeing to the stadium as the price of being given a Tassie team, despite no such demand ever having been made of any other state.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has backed the stadium build in a state beset by homelessness.Credit: Dan Peled
The process since has been a secretive and shambolic exercise. As well as seeming to heroically underestimate costs – the Perth Optus stadium was originally budgeted at $700 million but ended up costing $1.8 billion – in a year in which construction material prices rose by 24 per cent, the stadium costs, in a feat of magical thinking, dropped from $750 million to $715 million.
Nor has the Tasmanian government costed the public transport links, major road works on one of the state’s busiest arterial roads and provision for parking, which will be hundreds of millions of dollars more. It will be Tasmanians who pay for this in foregone housing assistance and closed hospital beds.
Nor should the AFL rest easy: given the Tassie team will be state rather than corporate sponsored, it extracted a tripartite commitment from Tasmania’s three parties to the $180 million, 10-year deal to ensure there was no sovereign risk. Because of the stadium deal the Greens withdrew from that agreement last week. The AFL now faces the very real prospect of sovereign risk with the Tasmanian team.
The stadium announcement also meant one publicly popular project for the Macquarie Point site, an Indigenous Truth and Reconciliation Park that was to be the first major memorial to the frontier wars in Australia, was axed without warning. The park vanished like the past it was trying to restore to memory.
In hitching his star to this growing catastrophe, the prime minister will be seen to be at odds with two of his most important domestic policy ambitions: housing and reconciliation.
Here’s what Tasmanians want. Houses not a stadium. Real help for their homeless. An increase in Jobseeker. A functioning health system where people don’t die ramped. An adequately funded state education system where people learn to read.
Back-dropping Albanese at Macquarie Point this weekend, as he attempts to shroud the stadium in waffle about a multipurpose precinct, will be Hobart’s largest urban park. There, increasing numbers of Tasmanians now sleep rough in wet sleeping bags and collapsing tents.
Among them may well be the Albos of tomorrow, growing up with their mother not in the relative comfort of public housing in Camperdown, but a damp tent in a Hobart winter. That kid will know what she wants. It won’t be Albo’s Ulcer.
Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
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