Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens have long been on the record as supporting Tasmanian men's and women's teams in the AFL. Tasmania is a genuine footy state. We deserve teams in the national competitions. In fact, they will not be national competitions unless they have Tasmanian sides in them. And we thought we were on the way, because we knew that we had cleared every single hurdle, even the blatantly unfair and unreasonable ones, that were put in our path by the AFL. But then, not long ago, at five minutes to midnight, into town swans AFL CEO Mr Gill McLachlan. Having driven straight past the homeless Tasmanians sleeping in tents on the Domain, he arrogantly demanded that we spend $1 billion on a sports stadium we don't need, instead of building them the homes they so desperately need. Worse than that, he said that unless we build this sports stadium that we don't need we will not get teams in the AFL.

This is a disgrace. It's an insult to Tasmanians. It is nothing less than a blackmail of our state. He's got no right, and the AFL has no right to blackmail our state like this. Nor should the state Liberal government so weakly cower in the face of the AFL's demands, because it's all about the money for the AFL and for Mr McLachlan. You could not find a more literal example of the phrase 'moving the goalposts'. For nearly two decades the AFL has been happy for Hawthorn to play at York Park, accepting millions of dollars of the state's money to buy the matches. We've been happy for games to be played—North Melbourne, at Bellerive in the south again—millions of dollars of taxpayers money to buy those games into Tasmania. And now, at the eleventh hour, with all the ridiculous arguments against the Tasmanian team having being carefully dismantled, apparently we don't have a good-enough stadium.

Well, give us a break. They were good enough for the AFL for the last 20 years and they will be good enough for the next 20 years. The state does not have $1 billion to spend on a footy stadium we don't need while thousands languish on our public housing waiting lists and on our elective surgery waiting lists. Aboriginal Tasmanians were promised a truth and reconciliation park as the centrepiece of the Macquarie Point development. They've been working on it for years—a place of healing, a place of storytelling, of connection and of country. Then they woke up not long ago to the news that a stadium we don't even need would take priority over a reconciliation and truth park and that the park could quite literally languish in the shadow of a stadium—no consultation, no communication, just: 'Here it is; like it or lump it.' Well, news for the AFL and Mr McLachlan: Tasmanians don't like it and are not prepared to lump it. Tasmanians are literally dying while waiting for ambulances, or dying in ramped ambulances because there are no hospital beds available to save their lives. It is offensive in the extreme to spend over a billion dollars on a stadium like this that we don't need while our hospital system buckles under the strain of years of underinvestment and so many Tasmanians are sleeping rough.

Only the federal Labor government can save us from the Tasmanian Liberal government. The Greens urge Mr Albanese to listen to the calls from across the spectrum, from across the Tasmanian community, and refuse to fund a single dollar of this massive white elephant. If he does that, if he refuses to fund it, it will not be built. And I'll tell you now: if it's not built, sooner or later we will get our teams in the AFL and the AFLW but those teams must be delivered on reasonable terms, not at the expense of Tasmanians who most need help and certainly not at the expense of a pure-and-simple obscene attempt to blackmail Tasmanians into spending a billion dollars of public money nobody can afford on building a stadium nobody needs.