The deputy prime minister stood patiently in misty drizzle in the middle of the postcard-pretty North Hobart football oval, as did the Tasmanian premier, Richmond’s Jack Riewoldt, a sizeable media pack, various Tasmanian football identities and AFL officials.
They listened as the AFL’s version of a state premier, Gillon McLachlan, told the story of how this state, the nation’s smallest and most ignored, had finally been given a team in the AFL competition. McLachlan detailed why this team was a moral imperative, what it would entail – an expensive roofed stadium in particular – and why it would succeed.
McLachlan, not the politicians, was the commanding figure in a scene that typified Tasmania – damp and cold, yet warm in spirit, informal; more like a footy club social than a grandiose occasion.
AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan, Tasmanian Premier Jeremy Rockliff, deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, and Richmond star Jack Riewoldt at the announcement of the AFL’s 19th team – in Tasmania.Credit: Getty Images
No razzmatazz. No music, long-winded speeches or non-footy celebrities. This felt intimate, small scale and as McLachlan confirmed the entry of Tasmania, there were plenty of misty eyes, too.
Riewoldt, who had played his last game of local footy at the North Hobart oval, was among those who found the occasion emotional. The Tassie team was too late for Jack to join, given it was slated for 2028, but he knew players in the current AFL who were “excited” about Tasmania, including non-Taswegians.
“You’re going to have the most passionate supporters behind you because it is their state, it is their island, and they’re going to be barracking for their team,” he told me.
One of the animating beliefs of the advocates for a Tasmanian team has been that the game of Australian football is withering in the Apple Isle and that it can only really revive by offering kids the dream of suiting up in that green jumper with a map of Tassie (probably called the Devils).
“It certainly would have gone backwards,” said Riewoldt of the future of footy in Tasmania, had it not been granted a team.
The scenes at North Hobart Oval for the announcement of the Apple Isle’s own AFL club.Credit: Getty Images
Premier Jeremy Rockliff had commended the “believers” – an echo, maybe unconscious, of Paul Keating’s “true believers” speech that also followed an improbable victory (1993), while McLachlan and deputy PM Richard Marles, a full-blown Geelong tragic, had also recounted how Tasmania had produced legends in Hudson, Baldock, Hart, “Richo” and Riewoldt who had been forced to ply their trade on the mainland.
“You’re going to have the most passionate supporters behind you because it is their state, it is their island, and they’re going to be barracking for their team,”
Proud Tasmanian and triple-premiership Tiger, Jack Riewoldt
“A 19th club in Tasmania, for Tasmania, uniting Tasmania,” said McLachlan.
But was it really Tasmania United? Not exactly.
Those assembled on North Hobart Oval – the same oval where the Tasmanian state of origin side, coached by a passionate Robert Shaw, upset Victoria back in 1990 – might have all backed both the entry of Tassie and the massive stadium construction and urban renewal project at Macquarie Point.
But it is also very Tasmanian to have significant dissent on an issue that involves a huge project, instigated by a powerful mainland-based vested interest, that some locals feel has been imposed upon them.
To be clear, there is broad support for the Tassie team. The dissent centres on the use of a) the Macquarie Point site for the stadium, and b) the expenditure of Tasmanian dollars – and there aren’t too many – on a lavish facility when, as the Hobart mayor recently put it, Tasmania already had “two perfectly good stadiums” at Bellerive (Blundstone Arena) in Hobart and the University of Tasmania stadium in Launceston, where North Melbourne and Hawthorn having been playing four home and away games each respectively.
The AFL has secured a deal in which the risks of a budget blow out rest with the Tasmanian government, rather than the league, which is investing $360 million in the team and Tassie footy over a decade, but only $15 in the stadium.
Therein lies the AFL’s model: We give you a team, you build us a stadium. The AFL has been astonishingly successful in persuading governments, of all stripes, to pay for the cost of their new or upgraded stadiums in Perth, Adelaide, Gold Coast and Geelong, not to mention the MCG and Marvel Stadium.
Macquarie Point is so identified with what some locals see as an AFL shakedown that it might as well be re-named McLachlan Point.
For the critics of the new Hobart stadium – and these include the local RSL, the writer Richard Flanagan, the state Greens and ALP leadership and local member Andrew Wilkie – Macquarie Point is unnecessary, when the dollars in their minds are more needed elsewhere. Per capita, Macquarie Point will be the equivalent to spending $12 billion on a stadium in Victoria.
But on this day when gloomy skies were belied by the upbeat spirit of Tasmanian football and by the sense that justice has been delivered and history was on the turn, Macquarie Point wasn’t the main point.
Tasmania had been given full football statehood. That act of recognition, not government dollars or priorities, was what counted.
