The Stadium Tasmania Cannot Afford to Build – Yet Cannot Refuse
Tasmania is preparing to borrow close to a billion dollars to build a stadium the state will not own, on recycled land it does not control, for a league it cannot negotiate with, to host little more than a dozen games a year.
This is not infrastructure. It is tribute. The AFL has made it clear: build a brand new stadium or forget ever joining the competition. The message could have arrived in a brown paper envelope stapled to a horse’s head.
Join us if you pay for your own initiation.
The Reports They Paid For – Then Ignored
The AFL ultimatum arrived after not one but two detailed viability studies. Both concluded that a stadium on the Macquarie Point site was economically doubtful, environmentally complex, and required a lot of remediation before anyone could pour concrete. The reports cost time, expertise and public money. They showed the project was uncertain, risky and burdened by inflated expectations.
The Premier read them, nodded, filed them, and declared, “build it and they will come.”
The AFL blinked, smiled and waited for the cheque.
A Stadium That Will Sit Idle
They will not come. A twelve game schedule does not create a year round economy. A stadium is not a seaport, a hospital or a university campus. It is an events space that lies idle for most of the calendar, servicing elite corporate hospitality twice a month. Yet Tasmania is being told to imagine a stadium as a windfall, a tide that will lift all boats, as though a retractable roof can raise household incomes, as though a corporate box can shorten emergency room queues, as though a fan precinct can replace a school.
The AFL Model: Weaponised Loyalty
Sport no longer asks Premiers to invest. It instructs them. The AFL has learned to weaponise loyalty. It offers identity for sale, but demands infrastructure in return. It is more like a Harvey Norman franchise than a sporting code. It does not negotiate with premiers. It issues terms. It does not court supporters. It invoices them. And governments comply because tribalism is political currency. A premier who cuts hospital funding can survive. A premier who loses a football team is up shit creek forever.
Public Debt for Private Profit
Public money is sucked into an arena designed for private profit, a virtual shrine to corporate greed. Remediation costs to fix the harbour land fit to build on, will not be cheap, yet these burdens fall on taxpayers, not on the league that demands the stadium. Commands it also. Naming rights, broadcast revenue and corporate hospitality will enrich the AFL and its commercial partners. Tasmania will own the debt, not the dividends. It will pay for the circus while the ringmasters keep the takings.
- Tasmania has Australia’s lowest median household income.
- More than 40,000 Tasmanians are on elective surgery waiting lists annually.
- Public hospital bed ratios lag the national average.
A Monument to Captivity
The stadium is sold as “nation building”, as though a grandstand can heal a broken health system. AFL shills are conning us that a stadium is on a par with schools, transport, housing and hospitals.
Instead it offers loan funded LED signage and premium seating. The stadium is not being built to serve Tasmanians. It is being built to serve a league that treats states as franchises and governments as captive markets. Yet Jeremy Rockliff has tied his premiership to the stadium, insisting it will deliver jobs, tourism and Tasmania’s long-awaited AFL/AFLW teams.
Jeremy Rockliff isn’t just building a stadium; he’s building a monument to captivity. It’s a Tassie speciality. The AFL dangled Tasmania’s team like a ransom note, and the Premier signed the cheque with a smile. Call it vision, call it desperation, or maybe just Stockholm syndrome in a suit.
The Premier in the AFL’s Pocket
This is corporate bullying sanitised as civic pride. Tasmania cannot afford the stadium and its premier cannot afford to refuse it. That is the fix Jeremy Rockliff finds himself in. A billion dollar debt to secure a dozen games is not investment. It is extortion dressed in club colours. The Premier is not a rookie; he is a seasoned backbencher promoted to captain just as the ship hit the iceberg.
Circuses Without Bread
Rome had bread and circuses. Tasmania gets pies, torpedo punts and long term repayments. The crowd will cheer, the apps will invite bets and the AFL will pocket every cent its ultimatums have earned. Stadiums do not unite communities. They bind them to the code that demanded them.
Sports may bring us together. But in Tasmania it will do so inside a stadium built on debt, delivered through corporate threats, sold as heritage and financed by generations yet to be born.
A billion dollar stadium on recycled land, built to host a dozen games a year?
Tasmania is not buying infrastructure. It is buying admission.
The AFL will own the profits.
Tasmanians will own the debt.
Coda: The Apple Isle as an Orchard for Others
The AFL did not come to Tasmania offering opportunity. It came seeking yield. It knew a small government could be bullied more easily than a big one. It knew a state with low wages and high pride would reach for identity even if it meant reaching into debt. It knew nostalgia was a more powerful bargaining chip than logic. And it knew that Tasmania would pay more dearly for that nostalgia than any mainland state ever would. That is why the AFL made the stadium a condition, not a partnership.
This is not sport expanding. This is capital predating. The league’s investors, broadcasters and corporate partners will not risk a cent. They will reap the returns from ticketing, broadcast rights, corporate boxes and naming deals while Tasmanians inherit decades of repayments and remediation costs for contaminated land they did not contaminate.
A billion dollars for a dozen games. Infrastructure that belongs to no one who pays for it. Returns captured by those who demanded it. Debt assigned to those who cannot refuse it.
The AFL will congratulate itself for “bringing the game home” while its investment class quietly extracts value from the island they claim to celebrate. They will call it heritage. They will call it community. They will call it belonging. But a stadium that bankrupts the public to enrich private interests has no loyalty to the place it occupies. It is not homecoming. It is harvest.
Tasmania is not the beneficiary of this deal. It is the orchard.
And the AFL did not come to pick fruit.
It came for the trees.
Additional Data and Context
- The new Macquarie Point Stadium in Hobart has been officially approved by the Tasmanian parliament; the latest cost estimate is AU$1.13 billion.
- Earlier estimates (2025) had already risen from AU$715 million → AU$755 million → AU$945 million.
- Under the plan, most of the build-cost will be borne by Tasmanian taxpayers. The state government must fill a financing gap (estimated at nearly AU$490.7 million) rather than pursuing a public-private partnership.
- Independent critics, including an economic review commissioned under a political agreement, judged the returns poor: the projected benefit-cost ratio was low and the stadium’s long-term debt burden may outweigh benefits.
- The stadium is explicitly a condition of entry to the national league for the island’s new team (Tasmania Devils), demonstrating how the AFL used its bargaining power: no stadium, no membership.
- The first games in the new stadium may be delayed; the club may continue playing at existing venues through 2029 and possibly 2030. Everything always costs more and takes longer when you sign with your eyes shut.
This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES
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I see the great boon (and the stuffed brown envelopes to the Libs) to all of Tassie will blow out to, at the very least, $1.750 billion (if not more) by the time it’s built. “That’s all right,” says Jeremy. “We can just flog off more old growth state forest and get rid of public servants and cut services left, right, and centre as the state debt grows ever larger. Besides, when the voters wake up and finally kick us out somewhere in the future we’ll just do what the Libs do, develop selective amnesia and blame it all on the party that takes over.”
David notes that reports were paid for, then ignored… two detailed viability studies concluded [the project] economically doubtful, environmentally complex, and requiring remediation before starting. The reports showed the project was uncertain, risky and burdened by inflated expectations.
Cracked record replay… 30 major UN Climate Change Conferences have been held. The IPCC has involved hundreds of experts from over 60 countries in compiling its reports. Furthermore, a 2017 petition was signed by over 15,000 scientists, indicating a significant and engaged community in regard to climate change and its associated risks.
A well-known observation suggests that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. The corollary would appear to be that you can provide people with the best advice, but it doesn’t mean they’ll act on it. Tasmania’s government appears intent on ensuring that state’s financial & economic ruin. Why would they do that? Does that AFL have some sort of magical hold over the feeble-minded individuals who comprise the current politicians in power? The premier of that state was a potato farmer before entering politics. Does digging spuds qualify one for the big decisions in life?
On a larger scale, the obduracy and inertia of the planet’s movers & shakers wrt the climate change snowball cannoning down the slope is a similar tale, writ large. All the advice is there. No more evidence needed. Yet it appears that SFA is being done, and what is being done is at such a miniscule scale that it’s more or less nothing but theatrics, not to be too tough on those who are actually trying to address the issues, but there is and will be no diminution in the disastrous macro-phenomena that we are currently witnessing.
Smart & stupid… what a paradoxical animal we are.
Another wonderful example of the old Roman bread and circuses act;keep the crowd distracted whilst robbing them of Hospitals,schools,public transport, etc, etc.
Rockcliff is the equivalent of an ancient regional governor,Tasmania’s ‘Elmer Fudd” of politics ,as Richard Flanagan so aptly named him.
Mind you, on a national scale this is only small beer when compared to what artful Albo is perpetrating with his increasingly secretive machinations behind the walls of the lodge.He has become much better at what the liar Morrison tried on us,and will sooner or later, suffer the same fate.
Canguro, spot on. It’s not the oldest political trick in the book, but it’s one of the most popular: pay for the report, ignore the findings, then press ahead as if “due diligence” has been done. When the evidence doesn’t fit the desired outcome, it just gets quietly buried under a stack of press releases.
Your horse-to-water analogy nails the wider problem. We’ve had decades of global consensus on climate science; oceans of data, shelves of reports, tens of thousands of experts and still the action barely registers beyond PR value. Governments prefer looking busy to being brave.
As for Tasmania, it’s hard not to think the state’s chasing a mirage. A flashy “nation-building” project beats the slow, unglamorous work of good governance every time. And, yes, sometimes it does seem that the AFL or any shiny development promise has a magical pull stronger than basic economics or environmental sense.
Smart species, dumb habits. We never seem to learn until the bill lands, and by then, it’s always too late to dispute the charges. In the end, however, it’s about power. When you look at the massive resources arrayed behind unreason, the gamble that Rockliff is taking has been supported by MSM and the completely unregulated power of the AFL, the fact that Tasmania is being sold a lemon and will suffer the economic consequences for generations is now buried beneath a torrent of chauvinistic (in the original sense) emotive propaganda. Tasmania is joining the big league and critics are worse than traitors.
Harry, too true. The playbook hasn’t changed much since the Colosseum days. When the policy cupboard’s bare, wheel out a shiny distraction and hope no one counts what’s gone missing. The stadium-as-spectacle fits perfectly: bread, circuses, and a press conference about “vision and jobs.”
Rockliff as “Elmer Fudd” is hard to unsee; bumbling along while the treasury haemorrhages and public services crumble. But you’re right, the sleight of hand isn’t confined to Tasmania. The national stage is pulling its own version of the same act; a mix of secrecy, spin, and photo ops standing in for genuine reform.
Different ringleaders, same circus tents and the audience keeps footing the bill for the popcorn. With massive help from an embedded with the corporate elite, MSM.
GL, Exactly, GL, the “boon” keeps ballooning while the public footing the bill gets smaller services and bigger debts. The maths never seems to bother them; just announce it as “investment” and hope the headlines drown out the figures.
Cut a few departments, sell a few forests, sack a few workers; that’s the Tasmanian version of “fiscal responsibility.” The real art form is what you’ve nailed at the end: political amnesia. Same party template every time; push the costs onto the next mob, then sit back in Opposition and howl about “Labor waste.”
Loops like this are why nothing ever changes — except the size of the cheque and the slickness of the spin.
This is a bit more complex than the AFL asking and the state complying.
We’ve been lobbying for an AFL team for decades. The league’s bureaucrats weren’t interested, primarily for economic reasons: Tassie is just too small a customer base to be financially viable. So, in an attempt to put an end to it, they tried a bluff: build a brand spanking-new stadium in Hobart and you can have your team. Any rational assessment would have said that the deal was not a goer because the cost/benefit ratio is waaaaay out of balance. But the then premier, assisted by Albo, called the bluff.
While I’m all for the AFL to get taken down a peg, this is not the way to do it. It’s a monumental waste of both money and land.
I’d be happy with $1.75b. The spreadsheet outlining all the costs of the project hit $2.87b, and over 12 years including fines for non compliance with the dates of finishing we have a total of $4.9b “..at the end of the conditional team agreement”. Which likely means that the AFL will then make a pathetic offer for the stadium, the government of the day will see immediate dollars taking over the running costs, and we the hapless taxpayer will be saddled with paying down the debt for decades after.
The Premier only instigated the economic report as a deal to get support from 2 previous Liberal members (subsequently lost their seats) who had jumped ship over the whole fiasco.
Bread and circuses all right !!!
A person close to me pointed out that potato farmers actually have to manage a range of environmental, climatic and economic factors to be successful. Only if he was an unsuccessful spud farmer would the insult be, perhaps, appropriate. However the broader criticism of the Premier for offering his posterior to the AFL for the obvious is completely appropriate. Sadly it’s the Tasmanian public who get the shafting, for decades to come. But then with the example of the Feds with AUKUS to observe who can be surprised? Recklessness with public funds spent inappropriately, is an increasingly common phenomenon among the political class. Fortunately voices drawing attention to the malfeasances are becoming more frequent and louder. An engaged electorate might vote accordingly but that won’t help Tasmania.
Another legacy of middle aged and older Australians for younger generations who are expected to pay for white elephants, bread & circuses and boondogles to keep the AFL, related media and political ecosystem in clover.