AFL stadium could cost $2.8bn, Richard Flanagan claims

The proposed Macquarie Point stadium are bound to blow out and amounts to a “catastrophe of accelerating chaos,” one opponent says. Here’s the mammoth amount he says it will cost.

$240 million for a football stadium in Hobart . Supplied Tasmania AFL Tasmania Devils AFL stadium

Award-winning author Richard Flanagan has described the proposed Macquarie Point stadium as “an appallingly stupid decision” which could end up costing the state $2.8bln.

Mr Flanagan launched a passionate attack on the stadium before parliament’s Public Account Committee in Hobart on Friday.

“I’m here for one reason — I am ashamed,” he said.

“I’m ashamed to walk past the homeless people every day in the city, the numbers of which grow.

“I was up in the Domain this morning, there are people in wet sleeping bags, there are people in collapsing tents. I am ashamed.

“I’m ashamed to be a Booker Prize winner in an island that’s got a 50 per cent illiteracy rate. I am ashamed.

“I’m ashamed to every day meet people with stories of the worsening and the worst health system in the country.

“I am ashamed because your government has only one priority, one policy — and that is to waste billions of dollars on this utter folly because our premier was seduced by the executive of a large entertainment corporation who came into this island and made that demand.”

Earlier in his evidence, Mr Flangan — who was speaking on behalf of the Our Place Hobart Group — said the claimed construction cost of $715m amounted to “a lie”.

“Based on the global evidence, the stadium has a four-in-ten chance of costing 206 per cent more than $715m, that would make it $2.1bn,” he said.

“So, if you add the $694m for the ancillary costs – and let’s be kind and forget the inevitable cost blowouts — we arrive at a figure of somewhere between $1.8bn and $2.8bn for the stadium, based on the best global data.

“With the return of the 1990s decade of despair looming, it will be on your watch if this is allowed to happen.

“The stadium is now a catastrophe of accelerating chaos. Each new decision begets a dozen worse.

“That the Premier, with all the glee of an adolescent online shopper with his parent’s credit card, bought a stadium, doesn’t make the purchase wise or right.

“The wise, prudent choice is the only sane choice. It is no stadium.”

Premier Jeremy Rockliff promised during the recent state election campaingn the cost of the stadium to taxpayers would be caped at $375m.

The design for the stadium will be made public within the next two weeks, the committee heard.

Macquarie Point Development Corporation chief Anne Beach said the “footprint” of the proposed stadium will be 30 metres from the escarpment on which the Cenotaph stands.

She said the corporation had worked with the RSL, but did not anticipate being able to address all of the issues it had raised.

“The Cenotaph is one of a number of sensitive users,” she said.

“We also need to be thinking about the port to the east, which has light implications, there’s critical access that we need to maintain, there’s businesses that operate around us, there’s hotels, there’s residents, so there are a number of sensitive cases we need to be aware of.

“We also need to think about the uses within the stadium and we have to balance all of those. “In managing those, we’re not going to be able to satisfy 100 per cent of everyone’s requirements, and there will be a scale of impacts.

“So we will not be able to meet perfectly all of the RSL requirements, but minimising the impact on them has been a fundamental element of that of the design of the stadium.”