Field of Dreams

Anthony Albanese announces a half a billion-dollar stadium in Hobart, looking for praise after submarines and tax cut money for rich people didn’t work out so well.

The Prime Minister gets confronted by hecklers protesting the approval of the extravagant Hobart stadium. Source: Nikki Davis-Jones

A new Hobart stadium gets announced as a precondition for a Tasmanian AFL team by a sporting body who pays no tax, who will foot barely five percent of the joint venture between state and federal governments, in a city with minimal public transport, soaring energy and food bills, and towards the top of the ladder for housing crises in the country. In a city with nigh on 200,000 people, one in eight of its inhabitants will be able to fill the 25,000 capacity stadium.

The AFL has placed burning hoops over precarious ground around the idea of a Tasmanian footy team in the AFL. The league threw precondition after precondition, unofficial promise after unofficial promise, and a few decades worth of lukewarm press releases at Tasmania, but it never eventuated into a team. After Fremantle and Port Adelaide, the AFL established Suns from the Gold Coast and Giants from Western Sydney, almost in spite of the Apple Isle, who had been taking a number since the Bloods became the Swans.

After providing Australia some of the legends of the sport like Ian Stewart, Royce Hart and Matthew Richardson, Tasmania, a state that exemplifies the grassroots nature of the sport, has languished in the modern world of profit-driven corporate minded sports administration at the AFL. Shepherded off the ball by the economic viability and television-dominated mindsets of arrogant board members, the AFL has benched Tasmania as it has run to the money more often than not, just like it has with the gambling partnerships it has folded into its incredible profit margins.

The design of the Hobart leviathan seems to pull all the stops. A fixed roof, part solid, part transparent will adorn the stadium, costing the taxpayer a huge sum. It will shade the nearby Hobart Cenotaph and tower over the low-profile skyline of Hobart. Set against a backdrop of fervent opposition by local advocacy groups, the concerns of Hobart Council, and the ire of denizens living in unstable housing dotted among transiently occupied Airbnb’s owned by suburban negative gearing mainlanders, the decision by the federal government to lead a half billion-dollar stadium adventure in Tasmania has many wondering what kind of government they elected.

In the sober aftermath of the submarines, preserving Stage Three Tax Cuts and refusing to #RaiseTheRate, the stadium announcement became an issue for the small junket strutting around the isle. Instead of celebrating the opportunities and the jobs, the fancy developments and the tenders that were being submitted in a frothing frenzy, Anthony Albanese looked his most cartoonish in his short and increasingly contentious term as Prime Minister. A day after the Hobart announcement, he dropped into Launceston and announced another multi-million investment at York Park (another ridiculous burning hoop AFL prerequisite) for what would be a handful of theoretical home games once all the contracts were signed. Blood was at boiling point for Tasmanians under the pump, their sentiment echoing free-to-air out across the mainland in 4K resolution.

As the hours went by, things spilled over in the collective public perception about this government, and what came next were the first signs of real public disapproval. The next day as Albanese was waxing lyrical on Kyle and Tegan’s relationship in front of a sewage treatment plant in Hobart, the Prime Minister was heckled in the press throng. “Let’s talk about housing, Prime Minister”. Albanese looked bewildered, mid-Sandilands, as he replied, “I think you have had your say”, before proclaiming his excitement at attending the shock jocks wedding. While taking a walk for the cameras, he was surrounded by a group of protestors who heckled him with a level of disdain almost emulating Scott Morrison in Lismore, holding signs that read “We need homes, not a stadium”. A confronting sign for a populist PM who plays politics by poll and injects tepid inspiration via focus group.

The lavish stadium project has the feel of a build in an oil emirate somewhere in the Middle East: badly thought, rushed and overpriced. The Tasmanian experience will not be paid with petrodollars, but with tax base money from a state facing an underfunded and neglected social crisis, in a country that is still trying to understand what nearly half a trillion dollars worth of submarines looks like. Baffled voters are shaking their heads while in the background developers rush to the site to outbid for lucrative contracts, joining the dozens of blue-suited consultancy mobs, business delegations and profiteering investor groups – the people that will finally get Tasmania their footy team. But at what cost?

The Albanese government will foot the additional funding to secure the Hobart stadium (Source: The New Daily)

This stadium project in Tasmania will cost $240m from the Albanese Government, $375m from the Tasmanian Government, $85m from commercial investors and just $15m from the AFL. While another bad government decision is being rammed through, a perfectly capable Blundstone Arena sits in suburban Hobart, having proved its adequacy hosting North Melbourne and Hawthorn franchises to play AFL games without any issue. The ground is perfect for a home and away season, it holds 20,000 people and could hold more with a renovation, leading many ordinary Australians to think that this massive tax funded proposed precinct is about the unreasonable expectations of the AFL and the awarding of lucrative contracts to the record-earning big end of town, at the expense of the poor taxpayer who can’t afford the price of a family ticket to an AFL game. The sports rorts continue, just in another form.  

It seems that either a blissful ignorance or a general lack of independent agency has created an open culture of misguided self-assuredness in the political class, whereby a badly planned opportunistic deal like this can be made so proudly with dopey smiles, all who seem ignorant of how it looks against the precipice of capitulation for many struggling citizens. Fluffed up by the clinking glasses of private interests and the AFL, political somnambulists on both sides of the major party divide have unmoored from the realities of the polity, and seem impervious to the pleas of local Tasmanian’s and Australians who can’t believe a federal Labor government is pulling off this kind of spend a few weeks out from a budget they have been warning austerely and crying poor about for months.

Tasmania, the pound for pound passionate supporters of our national game, have pound for pound concentrations of homelessness and poverty that represent nationwide social crises, threatening to unravel social cohesion across the country. After the bulldozing of the Morrison government, the public voted for health, education, housing and human decency, but instead it got tax cuts for the rich while a raging CPI sucked low income earners out of the airlock, and vapourware submarines stretched across a gossamer-thin alliance while our relationships in our own backyard sit uncultivated from years of neglect.

Perhaps it was fitting that Tasmanian protestors confronted Albanese about the stadium announcement in footy jumpers. The placards they held said things like “You can’t eat stadiums”: a plain reminder that no one gives a shit about the footy when they can’t afford food. All the parties involved seem like they will get their big stadium and Tasmania may finally get that team they always dreamed about, but this wasn’t the PR win Labor assumed it would be. Along with the counterintuitive spends and the lacklustre social offerings, this stadium could be the straw that breaks the back of the assumed good will of Australians for this government. As the hope of a new political dawn in this country sinks into a morass of tone-deaf neoliberal populism, Australians wake up to find themselves stranded in the shadow of another big, expensive mistake from this underwhelming major party government alternative, just weeks before a painful budget is set to fall on their shoulders.