AFL
The turmoil over the stadium that threatens to topple the Tasmanian government has its origins in the high-handed and ill-considered demands of the AFL. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
AFL demands sowed Tasmania’s political misery
A Tassie team is an old dream, and it’s occasionally flickered publicly. When the VFL became the AFL in 1990, Tasmania made bids in this first decade of national expansion but lost to Fremantle, and then again to Port Adelaide.
When the AFL expanded once more, a decade and a half later, the island state with its rich footy heritage suffered the humiliation of losing to the Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney – places of historic indifference to the sport but commended to the AFL by their population size.
Since 2001, Tasmania has enjoyed, with diminishing gratitude, the qualified presence of AFL footy: Launceston’s ground hosts a couple of Hawthorn games each year; Hobart’s accommodates North Melbourne. Neither arrangement has scratched the itch for a local team.
Seven years ago, something shifted. Tasmanian frustration was more noisily asserted, then amplified, by Peter Gutwein, a former player, when he was elected premier in 2020. The AFL adjusted, I think – becoming more sympathetic. The ground was softening.
That year, the Tasmanian parliament released a report about AFL in the state. It was largely harmonious: there was little disagreement between the two major parties, nor those who submitted to it.
The inquiry found that both major parties, and the majority of Tasmanians, wanted their own team and considered it a financially and culturally sustainable enterprise.
It also found that: “It is not necessary to develop a new, large capacity stadium at Macquarie Point. Upgrading [existing stadiums] … would be more valuable investments in the future of Tasmanian football than developing a new venue.”
This came two years before the AFL climbed its mountain and declared that Tasmania’s licence was conditional upon them building a new stadium.
I’ll mention here the submission of Richard Welsh, the manager of a sports events management company, whose words were highlighted in the final report and whose pessimism reflects well the great number of emails I’ve received from Tassie readers in the past year or so. Welsh wrote: “Since 2001 Tasmania has hosted AFL matches each year, with a peak annual crowd number of 17,529 in 2008. This year the average crowd was just 11,902 and crowd averages have dropped since North Melbourne began playing here in 2012. That makes it difficult for the faithful to argue that more games will attract bigger crowds.”
Does it? His argument implied that the decline was terminal and could not be arrested by the introduction of a local side. Those declining numbers could just as easily be used in support of a state club – that Tasmanians had grown tired of hosting Melbourne teams at the expense of supporting their own.
Sure enough, when the Devils were launched last year, they signed up 150,000 members within four days. There are about 210,000 today. Their goal was 40,000. Now, admittedly, the cost of membership was a mere $10 – which makes it harder to cite these numbers as proof of fanatical commitment – but no one thinks that the Devils will be playing to empty stadiums.
In 2022, the AFL announced its qualified support for a Tasmanian club licence. The following year, a meeting of the league’s 18 club presidents, which required a two thirds majority, endorsed the 19th. In 2024, the team was officially launched and a jersey, mascot and chief executive, the respected Brendon Gale, were unveiled.
It was all very exciting and had the appearance of stability, but the Devils’ existence remains parlous. What the AFL wants, in exchange for this licence, is the same as it was in 2022: a brand new stadium in Hobart with a roof and a minimum capacity of 23,000. And no, they won’t be providing much funding for it.
Last year, the Tasmanian Liberal Party was conditionally returned to government. With no party achieving a majority in the election, an ungainly coalition was forged and the premier’s commitment to satisfying the AFL became one of many reasons to formally test his authority. Last week, the Labor leader introduced a parliamentary motion of no-confidence. The motion passed, thus formally crippling the premier, and another election will be held on July 19.
This mess was not brought by the stadium alone, but it helped. In this coming state poll – the second in 15 months – the stadium, and the very existence of the Devils, will be central.
It’s maddening how few pundits have challenged the AFL’s insistence on the new stadium. In the welter of commentary I’ve encountered, the AFL’s position has been cited as if it were scripture or an immutable law of physics and not merely a condition that can be revised or abandoned. It remains something that can and should be publicly debated.
Instead, among footy’s opinion makers, there has been a collective shrug. The AFL, to those paid to think about it, is simply too powerful. Here’s an example of that fatalism from Kane Cornes, speaking on SEN radio last week: “The point is that it’s there and it’s not going anywhere,” he said. “That condition is set and it has not changed since the licence was granted. The deal is the deal and it’s not changing unless the AFL do one of the most monumental backflips. I can’t see that happening.”
It’s a strange surrender to the AFL’s power from a man who’s made a reputation for provocatively challenging it. However powerful and stubborn the AFL may be, that’s no reason to quit asking whether the league hasn’t been destructively recalcitrant on a condition they’ve never been particularly persuasive about.
To simply accept the AFL’s position as immovable, and thus unworthy of contemplation, seems bizarre. (I suspect that this kind of incuriosity is advocacy by stealth – a private decision not to challenge core elements of the deal lest criticism help kill it.)
There are plenty of questions and the reluctance to ask them has only delayed the inevitable: a political mess that now threatens the existence of the team itself.
In 2015, then AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan said at the National Press Club that Tasmania deserved its own team but that it simply could not afford one – and likely wouldn’t for at least another decade. If that’s the case, why impose an extravagantly expensive condition upon them having one?
What’s more, the AFL’s aggressive insistence on a new Hobart stadium upset what had become a bipartisan consensus in Tasmania: that the local team’s home be shared evenly between Hobart and Launceston, an arrangement that many thought might help unify a state often divided between its north and south.
In his submission to the Tasmanian parliament’s AFL inquiry, veteran sports broadcaster Tim Lane wrote about the importance of dual custody – a point also made by MPs of all parties, as well as the state’s tourism board: “Just imagine a Tasmania in which a team that truly represents the state … with those games shared equally between either end of the island,” he wrote. “The games would be feverishly patronised. More importantly, the attendees would be standing side-by-side as Tasmanians, not as people of any particular region.”
While the AFL spoke about fairness and historic claim – Tasmania has a long, rich association with the game and yet remains the only state without a club – it was dismissive of the state’s desire to ensure that the north and the south had an equal and practical stake in the team.
If we can accept that the AFL is not God, and its desires are not divine laws by which we must all reverently abide, then perhaps some compromises can be designed that better ensure a financially viable and socially accepted project.
Given the state’s debt, the instability of its now-dissolved parliament and the divisive public anxieties about its government’s spending, the AFL’s demands for a roof and minimum capacity seem capricious: the 23,000 threshold is only 3000 more than either of the two stadiums already used for AFL footy in Tasmania. A billion dollars is a lot of money for a poor state to spend upon so negligibly improving capacity.
Most of that cost would be borne by the Tasmanian government, the federal government having capped its pledge at $240 million. Given the spiralling costs and political instability of bearing them, should we not ask the AFL to justify its insistence on a roof with better words than… well, God damn it. I can’t find any. The league has simply insisted upon it.
In January this year, an independent survey of the Macquarie Point Stadium, conducted by the economist Nicholas Gruen, was released. It opened scathingly: “The central conclusion of this review is that the projected costs associated with the stadium at the Macquarie Point multipurpose precinct have been significantly understated,” Gruen wrote. “At the same time, the benefits have been overstated. Accordingly, the projected benefit-cost ratio has been significantly overstated … It also seems likely that the wrong site has been selected.
“The project is already displaying the hallmarks of mismanagement with much of that mismanagement stemming from officials’ attempts to deliver the project within the Tasmanian Government’s commitment to limiting the stadium’s impact on state debt to $375 million. This commitment cannot be met.”
No, it can’t: the AFL demanded that half the stadium be built by 2027 and opened in the Devils’ second season in 2029. As it is, neither the money, nor a builder, let alone a public mandate, has been found for it.
The AFL has behaved imperiously and largely without challenge from our game’s analysts. It’s relied more upon its bargaining power than the skill of its arguments, a dependency helped by all those commentators who vacated the space of thoughtful analysis.
So it’s been irritating to hear this week countless commentators angrily cite “politics” as the reason for the Tasmanian team’s uncertainty without ever specifying what they are. Funnily enough, a large part of the “politics” is legitimate debate over what, precisely, the state is willing to pay for a team – and how fair or reasonable the AFL’s conditions are.
To dismiss objections now as mere “politics” is vague and self-serving. It ignores the fact that the AFL has played its own and that its high-handedness has helped sow the turmoil now being reaped. For pundits to condemn “the politics” they never took an interest in understanding is too rich to swallow.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 14, 2025 as "A roof of one’s own".
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