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The Tasmanian government has dismissed yet another report advising against building a stadium on Hobart’s waterfront, this time by its own planning commission. By Gabriella Coslovich.
Tasmanian government punts official AFL stadium report
The Tasmanian Planning Commission report, delivered last week, is only the latest in a string of assessments bluntly rejecting the proposal to build an AFL stadium on Hobart’s waterfront. It is, like others, exhaustive and scathing: 236 pages, concluding that the stadium would trash the views and character of Hobart’s heritage waterfront while inflicting an unacceptable debt on Tasmanians.
The Tasmanian government was quick to dismiss the report, as it has other reports. Treasurer Eric Abetz labelled the commission’s findings “subjective assessments”.
More than a year of intensive work – conducted by an independent panel of five, with expertise in urban planning, law, local government, architecture and finance – was passed off as a matter of opinion.
The government’s response is as brazen as it is unsurprising. On the stadium front, Jeremy Rockliff’s government has bent the rules from day one. It has dodged planning schemes, dismissed and discredited experts and attempted to pass stadium-enabling laws using tactics that critics have dubbed Trumpian. The Labor opposition has barely blinked, and this week reaffirmed its support for the stadium. Parliament will vote on the project later this year.
The saga started in May 2023, when the Tasmanian government signed off on a deal with the AFL in which the state would be given its own football team on the condition of building a 23,000-seat roofed stadium on Macquarie Point. “No stadium, no team,” was the mantra of the AFL’s then chief executive Gillon McLachlan, who now runs the gambling giant Tabcorp. As premier, Rockliff repeated the line like a divine truth, despite polls showing that 59 per cent of Tasmanians opposed the project.
In October 2023, Rockliff declared the stadium a “project of state significance” to override the planning principles that cover Sullivans Cove, which encompasses the Macquarie Point site.
He hit a snag after the March 2024 state election, in which the Liberals were returned as a minority government. To secure the backing of the Jacqui Lambie Network, Rockliff agreed to the party’s demands for an independent analysis of Tasmania’s finances and the stadium. Two eminent economists were appointed to the task – Saul Eslake reviewed the state’s finances, and Nicholas Gruen the stadium.
Eslake’s report, delivered in August last year, found that Tasmania’s net debt would spiral to more than $16 billion by the end of 2034/35, with a corresponding rise in interest payments from $250 million to $730 million a year. This deteriorating economic situation was “entirely attributable to ‘policy decisions’ by government”, Eslake wrote.
He recommended “the government, and all other political parties, commit to achieving a series of fiscal targets over the next four to ten years”, including a return to a net operating surplus within four years. Eslake cautioned, however, against unduly cutting public services as Tasmania was already spending about $530 million a year less than it needed to in order to “provide services similar to the average level and efficiency of all states and territories”.
The Gruen report, delivered on January 1, compounded the dire economic outlook and exposed a government that had been trying to disguise the stadium’s true cost.
The stadium’s cost of $775 million, up from the original figure of $715 million, was “significantly understated”, Gruen wrote, and the project was “already displaying the hallmarks of mismanagement”.
Gruen warned that the cost to build the stadium would exceed $1 billion and would return just 44 cents in every dollar invested by Tasmania. Rockliff’s insistence that his government would not spend “a red cent more” than $375 million in funding the project was disingenuous.
“Cost blowouts and unacknowledged costs,” Gruen wrote, “mean that it is already clear that the Government’s undertaking to build the stadium without borrowing more than $375 million cannot be responsibly met.”
The stadium was located on the “wrong site”, selected in a “hasty process” involving just two parties – the AFL and the Tasmanian government. The project was divisive, its tourism benefits were overstated and its impact on the Hobart Cenotaph, an important site for the veteran community, and the wider social, economic and environmental value of the Hobart waterfront, had not been properly assessed.
Gruen advised the Tasmanian government to renegotiate the “unrealistic timeline” and punitive conditions set by the AFL and consider alternative proposals. These punitive conditions included a $4.5 million annual fine for the state to pay the AFL if the stadium was not 50 per cent built by October 31, 2027, a goal that looks increasingly unlikely.
“Tasmania is a proud state that, for too long, has given far more to the AFL than it has received,” Gruen wrote. “Tasmania deserves an AFL team and must have it at the right cost. But not at any cost.”
Instead of confronting the AFL, the Tasmanian government engaged in a campaign of character assassination, accusing Gruen of bias because he had met with stadium opponents, author Richard Flanagan and lawyer Roland Browne, before embarking on the report, and had failed to disclose this.
Gruen responded that the omission was due to an administrative error, since corrected, and that seeking views across the community was not a sign of bias but of independence. Eslake defended Gruen on ABC Radio Hobart, describing the Tasmanian government’s attacks on his integrity under the shield of parliamentary privilege as “very disturbing”.
In March, the Tasmanian Planning Commission’s interim report vindicated Gruen’s assessments: the cost of the stadium and supporting infrastructure had been understated, would require the state to borrow about $992 million and create a debt of $1.86 billion at the end of 10 years. The project failed on economic, social, architectural, environmental, heritage and urban planning grounds.
The government’s response? It torpedoed the planning process and drafted a new bill that would allow building to begin at Macquarie Point. The planning commission stood firm and continued its work of assessing the stadium, as required by law.
Former Labor leader Dean Winter’s no-confidence motion against Rockliff in early June stalled the government’s move to introduce its stadium-enabling legislation and prompted an early election in July. Rockliff was returned as premier of a minority Liberal government.
This month, the Tasmanian Planning Commission delivered its final, blistering assessment. The stadium was a financial catastrophe and, far from being architecturally “iconic”, was “overbearing” and “unexceptional”.
“Buildings do not achieve a positively ‘iconic’ status by virtue of being large, imposing or simply different,” the panel wrote. “Proceeding with the Project will give rise to irrevocable and unacceptable adverse impacts on Hobart’s spatial and landscape character, urban form and historic cultural heritage.”
The stadium would cost every Tasmanian household not on Commonwealth benefits $5900; by comparison, Sydney’s Allianz Stadium cost $273 for every New South Wales household. Taxes would need to be raised by $50 million a year for the next 30 years, or public services cut by an equivalent amount. Having used the government’s own cost estimates, the commission warned that as these were “generally optimistic there is a risk that the financial impact will be larger”.
Incredibly, the government’s costings had failed to include essential infrastructure such as a car park, new buses, a bus plaza or a northern access road. Consultation with the Aboriginal community had been “wholly insufficient”. Furthermore, the stadium was so tightly squeezed onto the Macquarie Point site that there was limited land for the urban renewal and affordable housing that was a condition of the Commonwealth’s funding injection of $240 million.
This fact prompted independent MP Andrew Wilkie to immediately write to the prime minister advising him that the Tasmanian government was intending to breach its agreement with the Commonwealth for the $240 million in funding for the Macquarie Point urban redevelopment. At time of writing, Wilkie had yet to receive a reply.
The Tasmanian government’s response? Yet again, it went on the offensive, with Abetz comparing the stadium to the Sydney Opera House and the Eiffel Tower. “The Eiffel Tower in Paris was considered to be a monstrosity and an eyesore by the artists and intellectuals in the 1880s,” he said. “Today it is the iconic feature of Paris that puts Paris on the world map.”
Rockliff said the Tasmanian Planning Commission had “massively” underestimated the social and economic benefits of the stadium and the effects that a “supercharged events industry” would have on the state. And yet on the same day the commission released its findings, Rockliff revised the cost of the stadium to $1.13 billion.
“As a growing state, reaching for aspiration and opportunity for young people, we must pursue ambitious projects like that at Macquarie Point,” he said.
“It will create jobs, boost our tourism and hospitality sector, secure world-class entertainment and keep our economy strong.”
According to the government’s own figures, the stadium will create just 203 full-time equivalent jobs – less than 0.1 per cent of Tasmania’s current total employment.
Not even the Department of Treasury and Finance buys the “strong economy” line.
In its Pre-Election Financial Outlook report, lodged in June, the department warned that the state’s net debt would grow from $4.2 billion in 2024/25 to $13.0 billion by 2027/28. “This will reduce the State’s ability to manage economic shocks and to provide services to the community in the future.”
Tasmanians are already facing those shocks, such as plans to cut jobs at the Royal Hobart Hospital’s Cancer Clinical Trials Unit by 58 per cent.
Amid all of this, Rockliff insists: “It is time to get on with the job.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 27, 2025 as "Expert advice bulldozed".
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