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The Baird government’s recent stadium strategy gives “big event sport” priority over suburban stadiums with nothing for places like Brookvale Oval, Shark Park, Campbelltown Stadium, Kogarah Oval, Leichhardt Oval, Penrith Stadium or Sydney Showground Stadium.
Instead the money was concentrated towards funding a Melbourne-style model where AFL clubs had to abandon their traditional suburban homes to share the MCG and Docklands. But how far could the money go if it was spent on boutique stadiums?
To give you an idea, a proposal for a new 15,000-seat stadium in Tauranga New Zealand, a city about the size of Darwin, has an estimated cost of $25 million.
So you could build 64 new boutique stadiums for the cost of the NSW stadium strategy budget of $1.6 billion.
That’s enough for ten in each of the five major cities plus 14 more in regional centres so you could add Wollongong, Canberra, Hobart, Launceston, Gold Coast, Geelong, Sunshine Coast, Townsville, Cairns, Ballarat, Bendigo, Albury-Wodonga and Darwin.
Of course the NSW government won’t fund all that, but would the Federal Government be willing to shell out? Well that’s the 64 stadium question I guess. In fact if you divide $1.6 billion by Australia’s near future population of 25 million people then it actually works out to $64 per person. So it really is the $64 dollar question.
Or if you spread it out over the forward estimates for the next ten years its $6.40 per year.
Given the importance of sport to Australian culture, maybe the federal government should have its own national stadiums strategy. It would also be good as part of this to develop an open source modular boutique stadium design to keep costs low.
You don’t need an exotic design that looks like the Guggenheim for Bonnyrigg White Eagles. The basic structural design could use the same building system but cosmetic differences could be made to make them look more individual on a case by case basis. It would also be good if these new stadiums were built with safe standing areas.
But the biggest problem with stadiums is the difficulty in reaching them and the lack of parking. A common answer people give is to have rail connections close to stadiums, but surface trains can’t go everywhere and subways are very expensive, at up to $600 million a kilometre, or about the cost of Lang Park.
The upper end cost of a bus on the other hand is around $1million so 600 buses with 50 seats would carry 30,000 people. At the lower end a 35-seat solar powered bus designed by Kiira Motors Corporation in Uganda would only cost US$58,000 if put into production. But whatever design you choose it’s probably cheaper than rail and if it’s part of a Bus Rapid Transit network where you pay before you get on at a platform at each stop it’s as quick to get on and off as a train.
Another advantage of buses is that they can also be put on different routes when not taking people to and from stadiums, unlike rail which is fixed. Since traffic congestion costs the economy around $20 billion a year, it might be a good way to help relieve some of that.
Noise might be issue but if they’re solar powered or use the Wrightspeed Powertrain it shouldn’t be a problem. If they could be built in Australia by Australian workers using Australian steel then that would tick all the right boxes for an election campaign.
Maybe the federal government will pay in full, or maybe local councils will find the money themselves, or maybe it’ll be all levels of government with a bit of private money as well, who knows? But with all of these boutique stadiums popping up maybe the FFA will start to review its positions on things like fan ownership and supporter’s trusts, safe standing areas and adding new divisions.
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