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Opinion
Thirty-three years after the Victorian Football League officially became national, Tasmania has finally been granted an AFL licence.
Despite what the AFL may want you to believe about this being exciting and momentous for Tasmania, many living in the state are feeling the exact opposite.
For a state which unlike New South Wales and Queensland has always embraced Australian rules football as its main code, produced many champions of the game and has one of the oldest surviving football leagues in the TSL, the question most people are asking is, why has it taken this long?
Why were parts of the country which neglected Australian rules for decades in favour of rugby league granted licences, while the AFL continuously made it as difficult as possible for Tasmania to get its own team? Of course, the answer to this is money.
The league has long prioritised growing the game in areas that have the biggest population and the most commercial appeal, even if the people living in those areas don’t share that same interest. All because the AFL are more interested in weakening the NRL than they are in rewarding the strongest football communities in the country, many of whom happen to be in Tassie.
Through living in Tasmania for over a year I’ve seen first hand the passion the local community share for AFL. The rivalry between Glenorchy and North Hobart is just as fierce as Collingwood-Carlton. Every weekend parents bring their kids and sit in the same stands that they sat in themselves decades earlier.
The number of volunteer parents and coaches who dedicate their weekends to supporting local footy is as strong as you’ll see in any country town in Victoria.
Contrast that to the AFL’s priority regions on the Gold Coast and western Sydney and it’s like chalk and cheese. Two regions which have had little to no history of Australian rules football, and have been given 10s of millions by the AFL to prop up manufactured teams still can’t even pull a crowd of over 15,000 despite their large populations.
The issue, though, which has angered Tasmanians more than anything since the AFL’s announcement is the building of the new $740 million stadium on Macquarie Point.
High-profile media figures such as Eddie McGuire (who has long admitted to protecting the AFL’s bottom line over the heart of the game) have been quick to spin this outrage as Tasmanians being misinformed, ungrateful, caring more about social issues than footy or simply not wanting their own team.
For all the reasons stated in the first paragraph this is just a complete fabrication of reality designed to shift the blame onto Tasmanians rather than highlight the AFL’s lies and double standards when it comes to the issue of Tasmania.
As many Tasmanians from all political stances have stated, the Apple Isle has two perfect AFL-standard venues already: one in Launceston that holds 19,000, the other in Hobart that holds 20,000, both of which have regularly hosted AFL games for the best part of 20 years.
University of Tasmania Stadium in Launceston. (Photo by Dylan Burns/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
If the new $715 million stadium was set to actually become a major 50,000-seat venue, then the AFL would have an argument to make for Tasmania to need a new, larger stadium which would be the MCG of the state. But that is not the case – the new stadium will only hold 23,000 people, essentially the same as the other two AFL-standard grounds the state already has!
When Gillon McLachlan was asked why Tasmania needed a new stadium his only answer was that Gold Coast and GWS needed “significant upgrades” on their stadiums in order to gain an AFL licence. More lies. Carrara Stadium in 2009 only needed an upgrade of $126 million to raise the capacity from 11,000 to 22,500, and Sydney Showground only needed a $65 million facelift to increase the capacity from 13,000 to 25,000.
If the essentially $100 million was put towards a redevelopment of York Park or Bellerive, you could bring the capacity to well over 30,000 on either of those grounds, which would easily go past the new stadiums capacity and at just a fraction of the cost. It’s simple math.
Then, they say the stadium must have a roof! The AFL aren’t even trying to hide their hypocrisy on that one. As it stands there is only one AFL stadium in the country that has a roof. A roof has never ever been a requirement for any new stadium, let alone a football team in order for AFL games to be played there. If you add a roof, you’re already looking at the cost blowing out to well over $1 billion.
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Despite how incompetent the AFL were in bungling McLachlan’s replacement as CEO, I don’t believe they are the same when it comes to the issue of Tasmania given this is an issue they’ve had well over 20 years to deal with.
Deep down they know how hypocritical they are compared to how they dealt with the two new teams from a decade ago, how they still give the Gold Coast and GWS millions of dollars in handouts each year because they are desperate for those teams to eventually work while continuously making it as difficult as possible for Tasmania.
That’s the only rational explanation I can give for this whole stadium debacle.
The fact the AFL has been willing to invest only a measly $15 million into the stadium itself while demanding a new $715 million stadium is a requirement if they want a team, when the facts show there is a much more cost-efficient way of doing it all, makes me and the Tasmanian public believe the AFL didn’t want it to happen. That they thought putting a high-priced and politically costly bounty on the Tasmanian government’s back like a stadium would make them fold on the issue.
The AFL know full well about the housing crisis that is crippling the state at the moment and how spending that amount of money on infrastructure (not football itself) doesn’t play well with the Tasmanian public.
Shame on you, AFL, yet again showing such a blatant disrespect for the people of Tasmania who you know full well deserve their own team more than several other states in the AFL, but even more shame on the Victorian media who have chosen to promote the AFL’s lies and hypocrisy on the stadium issue rather than call it out for what it is.
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