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When Gillon called Jeff: The icy phone call that lays bare tensions in Tasmania
Tasmania has long wanted its own AFL team. Now it’s been told it has to build a state-of-the-art venue to get one. Bullying tactics, or simple economics?
By Melissa Fyfe
Architectural render of the proposed new stadium at Macquarie Point, Hobart.Credit: Amy Brown
It’s a Friday in mid-June and a fascinating scene is unfolding in the Tasmanian parliament. It seems like a run-of-the-mill committee hearing: no voices raised, no impolite questions. But what’s happening is a slow-motion collision of two forms of power. On one side, beamed in from Melbourne, is AFL executive Andrew Dillon, who next month takes over from Gillon McLachlan as boss of Australia’s most wealthy and successful sporting code. On the other side are seven politicians. They’re of various stripes – independents, Labor, Liberal – but most share an unease about the AFL’s demand that, in order to join the national league, Tasmania must build a state-of-the art, roofed stadium on the Hobart waterfront.
Leading the charge against the AFL is upper house independent Ruth Forrest, chair of this public accounts committee. Forrest, 61, was raised on a farm in Tasmania’s footy-mad north-west. She’s a believer in the dream of a Tasmanian team; an AFL fan who chose North Melbourne as a little girl because she liked blue. In her former life as a midwife she even ushered into the world several of the code’s stars, including Fremantle captain Alex Pearce. But since entering parliament in 2005, Forrest has become known as a stickler for the sensible use of public funds and proper processes. She grills Dillon with a no-nonsense, calm persistence.
Dillon – straight-backed, unsmiling, stand-offish – repeats the AFL’s demands like a mantra: Tasmania must deliver a stadium, and not just any stadium, but one with a roof and 23,000 seats at Macquarie Point, a short walk from Hobart’s famous Salamanca Place. In May, after decades of refusing the footy-heartland state its own team – while expanding into non-Aussie rules territory such as Western Sydney and the Gold Coast – the AFL announced it would allow a club, likely called “The Devils”, to start playing in 2028, with a women’s team entering possibly earlier. In return, Tasmanian premier Jeremy Rockliff promised to build a $715 million stadium with $460 million of state funds, $240 million of federal money and $15 million from the AFL. The stadium, which the AFL wants completed by the end of 2028, is yet to pass planning approvals – indeed, it is yet to be fully designed.
For Forrest, it is troubling enough to hear a sporting body issue such specific and expensive demands for a stadium that will host just seven AFL games a year (the other four will be in Launceston). Like many Tasmanians, she’s unconvinced a new stadium is necessary. North Melbourne and Hawthorn – the teams together receive an $8 million annual sponsorship by the Tasmanian government – already play four games a season at, respectively, Hobart’s 19,500-capacity Blundstone Arena and Launceston’s UTAS Stadium, considered one of the competition’s best playing surfaces. The latter is set to reach a crowd capacity of 20,500 in 2025 after the first stage of a $130 million taxpayer-funded upgrade.
“The deal is contingent and conditional upon the stadium, 23,000 seats, fully roofed at Macquarie Point.”
Andrew Dillon, incoming AFL boss
But then comes a moment when Forrest feels Dillon goes too far. What would happen, Dillon is asked, if the planning process scuppered the stadium by discovering a significant issue, such as unsuitable ground conditions? It’s a fair question. Macquarie Point, once a gas works, a rubbish dump and a railway yard, is not an easy site. It is mostly land reclaimed from the original path of the Derwent River and while the polluted in-fill has been treated or removed, there’s a pocket filled with 3000 cubic metres of coal tar-contaminated material. Hobart’s main sewer line and sewage plant need to be moved and there’s a huge 1915 goods shed nominated for the heritage register.
But the AFL’s man is unmoved. “The deal is contingent and conditional upon the stadium, 23,000 seats, fully roofed at Macquarie Point. If any of those [aren’t delivered] … then the deal, of course, would fail.”
State politician Ruth Forrest is troubled by the AFL’s intransigence on the stadium. “It was like, ‘You just have to do this or else.’ ”Credit: Amy Brown
This was, for Forrest, the moment that revealed the AFL’s intransigence: even if a proper planning process stopped a stadium on Macquarie Point, Tasmania would lose its long-held ambition of joining the national league, with no other options or sites considered. “Whether he agrees or not, it is the proper process. It was like: ‘You just have to do this or else no team.’ ”
The story of the Hobart AFL stadium is more than a debate about whether Tasmania’s capital needs a new piece of infrastructure. It’s a story about what happens when the AFL juggernaut comes to town. It’s a story of the way the AFL has the power to displace all before it – other sports funding and taxpayer priorities, city visions and, as we’ll see, even the people it represents: grassroots clubs and players. It’s about the appropriate level of public support for a tax-exempt not-for-profit that in 2022 earned nearly a billion dollars and signed a seven-year media rights deal worth $4.5 billion, the biggest in Australian history. And it’s about the responsibility that comes with power and influence. If you make a roofed stadium a condition of a much-wanted footy licence – and demand it in Tasmania’s most significant urban redevelopment site – do you bear any responsibility for the potential fallout? Is it right to put this request on the taxpayers of Australia’s smallest state, already struggling with housing and health crises? Or is it simply the price of the ticket if you want to play the game?
Former Victorian premier and ex-Hawthorn president Jeff Kennett thinks there’s a line and that the AFL, in its hubris, has crossed it. “I think the AFL should accept more responsibility for the economic and therefore social impact of their demands on the Tasmanian community as a whole,” he tells me after reading the contract between the AFL and the Tasmanian government that was signed in May. “I hope one of the things that Mr Dillon might do is allow Tasmania to enter the competition without putting its head into a debt noose for years to come.”
On an overcast August morning, Jeremy Rockliff strides across his 11th-floor office to the window. “Not a bad view, is it?” he says, taking in the waterfront’s tangle of yachts and masts, the stately warehouses and the way the city folds over the Derwent hinterland. It was here that outgoing AFL boss Gillon McLachlan has said he and Rockliff looked down and imagined Friday night footy at Macquarie Point. “You’ll be able to see the stadium from here in a couple of years … just,” Rockliff says, acknowledging a building partly obscuring the view.
Tasmanian premier Jeremy Rockliff and outgoing AFL president Gillon McLachlan shake hands after the deal is signed in May.Credit: Getty Images
Rockliff, in blue blazer and tan pants, downs his coffee and sits with me around a small table featuring Australian Adventure Bike Magazine, a guide for the off-road motorcycle enthusiast. A farmer and progressive Liberal, he has a kind demeanour but seems a bit low-energy this morning. The stadium has divided Tasmanians, with several polls (albeit with biased questions) indicating two-thirds might be against it. But the stadium has also divided, and almost toppled, his government. In May, shortly after he signed the contract with the AFL, two MPs defected to the crossbench, citing debt and secrecy concerns about the deal. Finding himself suddenly in minority government, Rockliff secured his rogue colleagues’ support by promising to send the stadium through a rigorous planning process and letting parliament have the final say. He also released the contract, which revealed Tasmania will face millions of dollars in penalties if the stadium is unable to meet the 2028 completion date (it also contained a revealing shopping list of other AFL demands; more on that later).
But Rockliff says the excitement about the team and stadium is energising him. Just the other night he was in the supermarket. “I wasn’t in a suit or anything, I think I looked pretty drab.” A mother, enthusiastic about opportunities the team might provide her son, urged him on. “So this is a tough journey. But in my view one worth fighting for because of the economic benefits that it will bring, not only in construction, and not only the benefits of an AFL and AFLW team, but far more broadly than that in terms of urban renewal infrastructure,” says Rockliff.
Jeff Kennett says Australia’s most wealthy and successful sporting code has crossed the line.Credit: Stephen Kiprillis
He and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese have both justified the taxpayer investment by pitching the stadium as part of a broader Macquarie Point precinct plan including upgraded transport, affordable housing, hospitality venues, hotels and a convention centre built at the same time. (It’s unclear how all this will be funded; the AFL has said the federal money is just for the stadium, but Albanese has said it’s for the whole precinct.)
The journey actually began with another man and another site. In late 2021, Rockliff’s predecessor Peter Gutwein had concluded, after speaking to AFL club presidents and players, that Tasmania would not get into the league without a new stadium. This much-sought-after AFL licence – especially coveted by Gutwein, a former player at WA and Tasmania state level – would have to be approved by a vote of the 18 club presidents. But there was nervousness among some of them, including Kennett back then, and a few thought that without a new stadium, the team would be a drag on league finances, reduce their annual distribution payments from the AFL and dilute the available talent pool.
“The football fan of today is not prepared to stand in the rain in the outer eating a cold pie.”
Peter Gutwein, former Tasmanian premier
So in March 2022, with virtually no consultation, Gutwein announced plans for a $750 million stadium jutting into the Derwent at Regatta Point, a few minutes’ walk from Macquarie Point. Gutwein wanted a roof, at an estimated cost of $250 million, for reasons similar to those Dillon expressed to the committee hearing. One was patron comfort, Gutwein tells me: “The football fan of today is not prepared to stand in the rain in the outer eating a cold pie and drinking an even colder beer.” And a weather-immune stadium would attract more mainland fans and large concerts that currently bypass Tasmania.
Gutwein’s preference was always Macquarie Point, but consultants had ruled it out because of existing plans. In 2015, the Tasmanian government had asked David Walsh, the founder of Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art, to sprinkle his magic dust on Macquarie Point, where little was happening. Walsh, Dark Mofo festival creative director Leigh Carmichael and Aboriginal historian Greg Lehman came up with plans for a public precinct that included an Antarctic science centre, hotel, conference centre, music bowl and a light rail for the transport-poor northern suburbs. At its centre was a truth and reconciliation art park and cultural centre to honour the state’s dark past of frontier conflict. The idea was a hit with the community. A masterplan was devised, planning laws gazetted, architects engaged and consultation with Aboriginal groups commenced. But progress was slow.
Meanwhile, after decades of rejection from the AFL, things had started to shift for the Tasmanian cause. A high-level taskforce, commissioned by the state government and headed by Virgin Australia co-founder Brett Godfrey, had debunked many of the old reasons used to deny Tasmania a team. In its 2019 business case, which was assessed in a report by the AFL’s own consultant, former Geelong president and ex-AFL commissioner Colin Carter, the taskforce found that a new Tasmanian team would have enough members and sponsors to sustain itself, albeit with an initial government subsidy of up to $11 million a year. Crucially, a new stadium did not underpin the club’s economics in the Godfrey or Carter reports. The taskforce said a new Hobart-based roofed stadium would be a “longer-term aspiration”, while Carter said a “stadium strategy” of “significant investment” would be required, but did not stipulate a new stadium above upgrades to existing ones.
Yet, in early June 2022, Gillon McLachlan flew into Hobart to meet with Rockliff, who had taken over from Gutwein two months prior, and for the first time publicly said there would be no team without a new stadium. “This team needs and will have a new stadium if you want a licence, and I think Tasmanians would expect that,” he told journalists after the meeting. But he didn’t elaborate on why the team needed a new stadium.
It will be incoming AFL boss Andrew Dillon’s job to make sure the deal is enforced.Credit: Getty Images
On his trip, McLachlan toured potential stadium sites and by late June, media reports had emerged that the AFL preferred Macquarie Point. (McLachlan later told me he thought building over the river at Regatta Point seemed too expensive and that he liked the idea of the stadium integrating into a wider precinct plan at Macquarie Point.) By September, cabinet had agreed to adopt the AFL’s preferred site.
I’m getting the wind-up from Rockliff’s media person, so I ask the premier to describe the AFL’s negotiation style. “Tough,” he says. “But they didn’t get everything they wanted.” What didn’t they get? He deflects. Does he really believe the stadium will cost $715 million? “Ah. Well … yes.” He doesn’t sound convinced. (And neither was former Collingwood president Eddie McGuire, who said in May on Footy Classified that a stadium expert had told him a roofed venue would cost $1.5 billion. “I don’t know if you’ve built a kennel at your house,” McGuire said. “Has it ever come in under budget?“) Rockliff says he always preferred Macquarie Point over Regatta Point because it’s relatively flat, the remedial work is almost done and it’s less costly to build on. But he wanted to make sure a stadium fitted (it does, tightly) and remains committed to including some elements of the Walsh/MONA plan, such as the Indigenous art park. It’s important, he says, that the stadium is respectful of “its surrounds”.
As I discover, that’s going to be quite a challenge.
I’m standing on the edge of a hill with John Hardy, chief executive of RSL Tasmania. Behind us is the Hobart Cenotaph, a 23-metre war-memorial obelisk unveiled in 1925. Directly below us, the barren asphalt of Macquarie Point stretches to the port. Hardy, a former British Army paratrooper, stresses that the RSL supports the AFL and a stadium, but his members have twice voted to express their disapproval of the proposed site next to the cenotaph. Based on information provided by the government, Hardy believes it will block sight lines to the city. “In the past, when troops were getting on the ships, they would look up, they could see this hill – and now it’s going to be a big wall, just there,” says Hardy, pointing about 40 metres distant. “If this was the Unnamed Soldier in Canberra or the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, do you think they’d be building a stadium so close?”
The other issue is that the AFL’s requirement for a roof will make the stadium much higher than an equivalent open-aired venue. Hardy says architects have advised the RSL that it could be as tall as 54 metres, as high as the nearby Hotel Grand Chancellor, widely considered a too-tall blight on the heritage waterfront. (Many of Hobart’s architects, including Robert Morris-Nunn, who designed several of the city’s waterfront hotels, are alarmed at the bulk and height of such a structure in a low-rise Georgian-era city. “It is totally out of scale with the historic environment,” Morris-Nunn says.)
“We have this organisation [the AFL] based outside the state that has basically changed our city’s plans and priorities.”
Anna Reynolds, Hobart lord mayor
Apart from the RSL, the other stakeholder most immediately impacted by the proposed stadium is the Indigenous community. Aboriginal academic Greg Lehman, who is also a pro vice chancellor at the University of Tasmania, says the proposed art park has gone from being a nationally significant centrepiece of Macquarie Point to something more or less squeezed onto the stadium’s front lawn. While Hardy says he’s spoken to McLachlan, Lehman says he’s heard nothing from the AFL boss. “If you look at the AFL’s web page you’d think that they had one of the most profound commitments to Indigenous people of anyone in Australia. That’s why their silence on the subject of the truth and reconciliation art park is so interesting. And, frankly, so incredible.”
Meanwhile, in her grand colonial-era Town Hall office, Hobart lord mayor Anna Reynolds is talking about city priorities. A new stadium wouldn’t make the top 10, she says (though she stresses the council has not formally considered the issue). She says an Antarctic precinct at Macquarie Point – articulated in the 2019 Hobart City Deal, a decade-long plan by local, state and federal governments – is no longer a priority following the stadium announcement (Hobart’s status as an Antarctic gateway city and research hub adds $160 million a year to the economy, with jobs for nearly 1000 people). Reynolds believes the stadium will block the long-held aspiration of local politicians and transport advocates to bring a light rail corridor into the city via Macquarie Point. And Hobart, she says, desperately needs a place for crowds of more than 10,000 to gather; the 13,000 square metre Indigenous art park was a solution. “We have this organisation [the AFL] based outside the state that has basically changed our city’s plans and priorities,” she says.
RSL Tasmania CEO John Hardy says his members have twice voted against the site because of its proximity to the Hobart Cenotaph.Credit: Amy Brown
It’s difficult, at first, to unravel the AFL’s insistence that a new stadium is – as Dillon put it to the public accounts committee – “critical to the [new] club’s financial model and future sustainability”. It’s not as if the AFL can’t afford to support the new Tasmanian team. Last year, it recorded $944 million in revenues and signed its $4.5 billion media rights deal (the 2016 deal was $2.5 billion for six years). And Colin Carter, the AFL’s consultant, was at pains in his report on the Tasmanian team to assure club presidents their bottom lines would not suffer (this was before the 2022 media deal and without considering a new stadium). But it all starts to make sense when you understand stadium economics – known in the AFL world as “clean stadium deals” – and the league’s desire to repeat in Tasmania a formula that’s been hugely successful for it around Australia.
Under a clean stadium deal, a club can cream off a large chunk of game-day revenue from the taxpayer-owned stadium. The club, for example, will pay a flat fee for the around-ground LED ribbon board and then sell its own advertising on it. It can also charge a premium on the corporate catering and ticket prices. For a club such as Geelong, this can mean an extra $1 million on home game days. “Stadium finances and economics is the biggest driver of financial performance and disparity in the competition,” says Richmond chief executive Brendon Gale, who has long advocated for a team for his home state. “Without a stadium, the Tasmanian team will find it much harder to compete at all levels.”
In the last decade, the AFL has had extraordinary success securing a string of taxpayer-funded and owned infrastructure and venue upgrades as home bases for its clubs. These include the $1.8 billion Perth stadium, the $535 million Adelaide Oval redevelopment and $700 million – the current-cost estimate by Colin Carter – for the Cats home at Kardinia Park. At each of these stadiums the AFL has negotiated lucrative clean stadium deals that underpin club balance sheets. And this is what it wants for the Tasmanian team, too. (Rockliff and the AFL are still negotiating some aspects of the stadium deal.)
But clean stadium deals are important for politicians to get right on behalf of the taxpayer. In looking at some of the existing deals, Good Weekend has discovered that while the AFL clubs are doing well out of them, the taxpayer has been left struggling to pay for ongoing maintenance and operational costs. Kardinia Park, for example, is relying on government grants to operate, while the Cats reap lucrative game-day revenues. The organisation that runs Adelaide Oval is making trading losses, and on the Gold Coast the AFL reneged on its commitment to pay the full operational costs for Heritage Bank Stadium (formerly Metricon) in 2018.
“Somebody is going to be writing a very big annual cheque to keep the whole thing afloat.”
Tony Cochrane, former Suns president
The government and the AFL both stress the Hobart stadium will be multipurpose and will offset taxpayer investment by attracting international and national events such as major concerts and other big sporting matches. In its economic impact assessment, consultants PwC predicted the stadium would hold 44 events a year, 28 of them new to Tasmania. Promoters tell Good Weekend that a 23,000-seat venue – which the state lacks – would be welcomed, although, as a boutique stadium, it would be too small for acts such as Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift.
But former Gold Coast Suns president Tony Cochrane sounds a note of caution about the PwC predictions. Cochrane has always believed a Tasmanian team would be financially unsustainable – with or without a stadium – but as a concert, theatre and event promoter he’s familiar with the economics of entertainment. He points out that the Gold Coast’s 12-year-old Heritage Bank Stadium is holding only 15 events this year, despite its original business case predicting that it would host about 30 (Gold Coast city has a catchment of 647,000 people compared with Hobart’s 253,000).
Cochrane says promoters don’t bring an event to a location because of a nice stadium, they do it because they think they’ll sell enough tickets. “I think the Hobart stadium, including its seven AFL games, will be unbelievably successful if it can get to 16 or 18 events a year. And that means that somebody – and it won’t be the AFL, of course – is going to be writing a very big annual cheque to keep the whole thing afloat.”
In talking up the Hobart stadium, the AFL regularly cites the broader economic stimulus of the Adelaide and Perth venues – even though they each host two AFL teams, carry larger crowds and are supported by bigger state economies and populations.
Most economists don’t believe stadiums are economic development catalysts, and generally take the view that stadium-connected spending – such as going to a nearby restaurant afterwards – is money that would be spent anyway, but elsewhere. In January, three US economic professors, who specialise in sport, published a major paper reviewing 30 years’ research on stadium economics. They were particularly critical of consultants’ reports used by politicians and sporting codes to justify broader benefits. “Economists who have scrutinised commissioned reports consistently find them to be flawed,” wrote the authors John Charles Bradbury, Dennis Coates and Brad R. Humphreys.
Likewise, Matt Saunders, a Richmond fan and senior economist at The Australia Institute, is keen to put into context the PwC modelling that shows the Hobart stadium will generate $85 million a year of extra economic activity. “This may sound a bit weird, but the Tasmanian stadium as modelled by PwC will have less of an impact on the economy than a leap year. It’s less than one day’s extra economic activity.”
Back in Hobart, Richard Welsh has come to pick me up in his white Tesla. Welsh, 41, is an event organiser who specialises in athletics and running festivals, and he’s suitably dressed in stylish track pants and Brooks sneakers. His beef is about fairness in sports funding, and he points out that 28 sporting organisations in Tasmania are this year sharing $954,000 of government sports grants, while AFL Tasmania, which oversees local football and talent pathways to the AFL, gets a $500,000 annual grant. Meanwhile, he says, the latest AusPlay figures show that swimming, athletics, running, cycling, soccer and basketball are all more popular activities for Tasmanians than football, which is 10th on the list.
We wind up through the Domain – the parklands and community sporting grounds just north of the CBD – to Hobart’s main athletics track. “It’s the only athletics track in southern Tasmania, and it’s fully booked for all of term one next year,” says Welsh. Then to the state’s soccer headquarters, where the change rooms look old and unloved, past the state netball centre, where Welsh reports a floorboard gave way during a recent game.
“If any other sport came here and made these sorts of demands they would get laughed back on the next kayak to the north island.”
Richard Welsh, event organiser
Welsh makes no effort to disguise his contempt for the AFL. “They want a stadium built for seven games, but they won’t even train in it. How precious are these guys, honestly?” Welsh is referring to the team’s proposed new purpose-built training and administration facility, which the Tasmanian government has agreed to build for $60 million, plus $10 million from the AFL. (It’s not unusual for state and sometimes federal taxpayers to fund AFL elite facilities – at a rough estimate, politicians have pledged $316 million on these AFL facilities nationwide, most of it in the last 10 years. But most of the grants are about $15 million, making the contribution of $60 million one of the biggest given to an AFL high-performance facility.)
Under the contract, the facility is not part of the stadium but must be built within five kilometres of the Hobart CBD, have 9000 square metres of floor space – the size of three average Coles supermarkets – and two training ovals nearby: one MCG-sized and a smaller oval of MCG quality. This last requirement has sparked concern in Hobart over a loss of community green space to the AFL. Meanwhile, the Tasmanian government has also said it will pay $144 million to the new team over 12 years. “If any other sport came here and made these sorts of demands they would get laughed back on the next kayak to the north island,” says Welsh.
There are, of course, many Tasmanians who support the team and the stadium. Like Nick Probert, an AFL Tasmania Hall of Famer, coach and talent manager, who was drafted by Collingwood as a teenager and played in the reserves. “I’m just an average guy in the middle of our economy here in Tassie,” he says. Probert predicts the seven games in the new Hobart stadium will help with the winter low-tourism season and provide “an economic sugar hit like seven Dark Mofos”, and thinks the team will be wonderful for junior football and young people (the AFL will invest $123 million over 10 years in game development and talent academies while funding the club $21 million annually). “We have some of the unhealthiest, and mentally unhealthy, kids in the country and it’s getting worse.”
There are people like Jim Wilkinson, 71, with whom I share a coffee on the Hobart waterfront. The former lawyer and football commentator served as an independent state MP for 24 years. He played for South Melbourne and has the stiff-jointed gait of a man who has had several knee reconstructions. Blundstone Arena, which is across the river from the Hobart CBD, doesn’t have the seating capacity, he says, and any further development is likely to meet community resistance. “All the states around Australia have brought the stadiums back into town.”
But, as Brett Godfrey’s taskforce report pointed out, it’s also true that deep distrust of the AFL festers in Tasmania, particularly in football circles. There’s residual anger at its long-held rejection of the state’s request for a team and the 2008 decision to chase the financial promise of bigger, traditionally non-AFL markets, with the creation of the Gold Coast Suns and Greater Western Sydney Giants. While those northern markets had little Aussie rules heritage, Tasmania was one of the founding heartlands of Australian rules football, providing 400 players for the AFL and VFL over the past 127 years, including the Tasmanian AFL Hall of Fame Legends Royce Hart, Darrell Baldock, Peter Hudson and Ian Stewart.
Current and former club presidents tell Good Weekend that the AFL has underfunded the Tasmanian State League; teams have gone extinct, others have been forcibly merged. The top job of running AFL Tasmania is never advertised, they say, and there’s no transparency around where money is spent. I ask North Launceston president Thane Brady to describe the AFL’s management of Tasmanian football. “It’s been a silent murder,” he says.
Thane Brady, president of top state team North Launceston, describes the AFL’s management of Tasmanian football as “a silent murder”.Credit: Ness Vanderburgh
On a Monday afternoon in early August I meet Brady at UTAS Stadium, Hawthorn’s Tasmanian home and where state league games are played every second week during footy season. In the corner of the room is a glass enclosure full of tarnished trophies and pictures of crossed-arm blokes. Brady grew up in one of the struggling suburbs near the stadium. “I had nothing and the football club gave me a job, it gave me a start in life,” he says.
He went on to become an industrial relations consultant but is now semi-retired, partly because he devotes 50 hours a week to the club, one of Tasmania’s most successful state league teams. Match day on Saturday lasts 14 hours. Then, on Sunday, there’s another 14 hours running a big junior football program. “The kids turn up with no drink bottles, they haven’t had breakfast,” he says.
North Launceston is a world away from the small-town community footy team, just 20 minutes south of here, that I once followed like a teenage groupie. The players don’t have a culture of drinking after the match – many are under 18 – and they are serious competitors. But, as part of a restructure, the AFL has decided to disband the state league from the end of next year. McLachlan says it fragments the regional leagues, that travel times for players are too long and that it hasn’t been embraced by the community. This means the top teams of North Launceston and Launceston will have to play in the local league against teams they would normally expect to beat by 20 goals. “If you take out the challenge, our fun is gone. Guys like me, we won’t want to be here,” says Brady.
“We’ve realised these things come with the killing of our club. I’m heartbroken.”
Thane Brady, president of North Launceston Football Club
The new AFL team and a new Hobart-based VFL team (to be up and running in 2025) will also pull talent south, says Brady, compounding the problem. And if the club goes, so will the 400-strong junior program. “We went from being 100 per cent supportive of the [new team]. And we were prepared to cop the stadium. But now we’ve realised that these things come with the killing of our club. I’m heartbroken.”
Gillon McLachlan has a twinkle in his eye when he spies the long list on my sheet of paper. “Are they all questions?” he asks. When I first walk in, he’s on the phone negotiating something: driving a deal is, of course, what he’s well known for. As he nears the end of his nine-year term as AFL chief, his legacy will include establishing the AFLW, shepherding the league through COVID-19 – and bringing Tassie’s team dream a significant step closer to reality.
He has three major arguments to justify a new stadium. One is that stadiums and clean stadium deals have become critical to a team’s membership, crowd numbers and financial health (he said Brett Godfrey’s task force and the Carter report – which found a team could exist without one – were from a “pre-COVID world”). Second: a big part of the business model for the Hobart stadium is attracting people to visit the state and spend money. On average, he says, 3400 people travel interstate to see an AFL game, but each Tasmanian game is likely to attract 5215 mainland fans to watch a game featuring a Melbourne club and 2020 spectators for other clubs. Third: stadiums are community assets and the “economic heart and lungs of a city, pumping lifeblood through every pub and restaurant”.
Hobart architect Shamus Mulcahy used publicly-available dimensions to produce this render of the proposed stadium at Macquarie Point.
As for the issue of clean stadium deals draining taxpayer-funded venues, he says he didn’t negotiate Geelong’s Kardinia Park deal. “I’ll take ownership of the ones I’ve negotiated,” he says. Which ones have you negotiated? “Enough of them.” He agrees that Heritage Bank Stadium hasn’t attracted the event numbers predicted in its business case. This is because it’s too close to Brisbane, he says. At one point he tells me that, generally, stadiums don’t make profits, but then says: “I think with Tasmania, with 40-something events a year, [the stadium] will make a profit. All the modelling says it will.”
We skirt around the issue of responsibility: when the AFL specified a roof, I ask, did it consider the cost and how it would fit into the landscape? “Yeah, I think so,” McLachlan says. But when I ask about the planned Indigenous art park, he says: “We didn’t choose Macquarie Point. That has nothing to do with the AFL.” McLachlan also says he had no idea about Regatta Point being the previously chosen site. (In a letter released under the Right to Information law, Gutwein wrote to McLachlan and other stakeholders about his Regatta Point decision in March 2022.)
In 2019, Hobart architect Don Gallagher released concept plans of a stadium at Macquarie Point that leaves the Cenotaph visible from the ground. It was featured in the state government’s taskforce report into an AFL team.
“Making sure [the stadium is] contemporary and fits into that landscape is absolutely imperative,” McLachlan says. “But the process of engagement, how it looks, that’s not for us. We don’t own it and it’s not our decision.”
For those who say the AFL, a tax-exempt not-for-profit, should get less taxpayer grants and public money for its infrastructure, McLachlan argues that the league reinvests that money in community and elite facilities, Indigenous and volunteer programs and game development. “So why are we a community asset? Because for millions of people every week, whether their kids are playing or they’re playing at community level, or they’re following their team at elite level, it’s the rhythm of their week, and it actually determines and structures up their lives.”
As we walk out, McLachlan muses on a few things I’d put to him that Jeff Kennett had said. It’s clear that Kennett’s criticism of the Tasmanian conditions irks him. We stop at the top of some stairs. McLachlan pulls out his phone and dials Kennett. On speakerphone, I hear the familiar nasal tones of the former premier, who is chipper at first before quickly realising this isn’t a friendly call. It’s uncomfortable, because Kennett doesn’t initially know I’m there; a minute in, McLachlan mouths to me that the conversation is off the record. There’s something disconcerting in the way McLachlan, the head of a sports body, speaks to a former premier, albeit one not averse to strong-arm manoeuvres himself. But this was unsurprising to Kennett, who tells me later: “The AFL answers to no one and they will treat anyone and anybody in any way they think to advance their own interests … They [the AFL] don’t like being challenged. But I don’t think [McLachlan] has any idea of the economic cost to Tasmania this stadium in particular is going to present.”
Ruth Forrest, like many Tasmanians, wants the AFL to renegotiate its contract with the government. And if the AFL comes back to the table, there are plenty of ideas for compromise. Could a boosted ferry service bring people into Salamanca for socialising after matches at Blundstone Arena? Could there be no roof, so the stadium could sit lower in the landscape? Could the main stadium be in Launceston and the training facility in Hobart? “For it to be a true national competition, Tasmania must be in it,” says Forrest. “It’s just a real tragedy that we’ve got to this point where the AFL has taken this position that shows no regard for Tasmania’s financial position and capacity.”
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