Get a Tassie AFL team up and running First and worry about a stadium later

It’s more important to put our energies into getting a Tasmanian AFL team ready for the 2026 season and address the stadium issue when there’s time, writes

HOW good it was to read the headline Rocky Gets Gloves Off – Premier’s bombshell threat to AFL over Tassie team (Sunday Tasmanian, July 24). As has been said by many people in Tasmania and elsewhere over many years, we want and deserve a team in the AFL national competition, but it should not be at the expense of all else, particularly at the moment, health, housing and homelessness.

And certainly not by being blackmailed with demands that have not previously been made when the AFL has expanded in other areas.

If this current bid is rejected because of our inability to commit within the next few weeks to the building of a new stadium, the AFL, and their existing clubs should hang their heads in shame. The AFL is the body responsible for the promotion and development of Australian Rules Football in this country. Its purpose is stated as ‘to progress the game, so that everyone can share in its heritage and possibilities’. Is it fair to assume that ‘everyone’ includes Tasmanians?

If this current submission goes the way of all the others, it will effectively be a further nail in the coffin of AFL in Tasmania.

It is timely to recap on a bit of history. Not to go back to the last century. Just to 2008. It was then that the AFL acknowledged that our submission that year ‘ticked all the boxes’, but did nothing. In 2009, the Australian Senate held an inquiry as to why Tasmania was the only state not represented in the AFL national competition, and asked whether Tasmania had been treated fairly by the AFL in planning to expand the competition with new teams from non-AFL areas such as the Gold Coast, and Western Sydney, in preference to a founding AFL state such as Tasmania. The conclusion from that inquiry was that Tasmania did deserve a team, but the AFL said their priority was to expand the competition in to non-AFL areas. Tasmania, already an AFL state, would have to wait, and the AFL was unable to say for how long.

In 2016 the state government presented yet another submission to the AFL. That was prepared by external consultants, Gemba, at significant taxpayer expense. The AFL chief executive at the time, Andrew Demetriou, reaffirmed that submission ‘ticked all the boxes’. But again, nothing was done.

Then in 2019, it was decided there would be one final crack at gaining admission. A taskforce was established in mid-2019 to formulate yet another submission. That

committee concluded that Tasmania could support an AFL club, and targeted a commencement date of 2025 with games to be played equally at UTAS in Launceston, and Blundstone at Bellerive, where AFL games had been hosted quite successfully, by Hawthorn and North Melbourne, for 20 and 10 years respectively.

The submission went to the AFL in 2019, but was not passed on to Colin Carter, a highly regarded former AFL commissioner and former president of the Geelong Football Club, for scrutiny, for 12 months. Mr Carter’s report fully supported our case for a 19th licence, noting also that Tasmania deserved inclusion because of its long history in the game, and the contribution it had made to the VFL and AFL. He made the interesting point that there were more legends in the AFL Hall of Fame from Tasmania, than SA and WA combined.

I may be wrong, but I don’t believe there was anything in either our taskforce submission, nor Mr Carter’s report, that said anything at all about the need for a new stadium in Hobart. Whether there had been discussions behind the scene, of course I do not know.

The question of a new stadium did not arise, publicly at least, until Eddie McGuire announced on his TV footy program last year that we would have to commit to building a new stadium. McGuire did not say why. He repeated that edict again earlier this football season, adding that we would likely have to increase the monetary contribution to keep the club viable to a ridiculous amount which is not worth repeating.

Unfortunately, we now find ourselves in a situation, where the AFL is belatedly saying, ‘no stadium – no admittance’. And it would seem they have now taken over the running to see if they can come up with a stadium plan that will be acceptable to everybody ie their existing clubs, the state and federal governments, the state opposition parties, the

HCC, and any other bodies affected by the site selection. And the really silly thing about all this is that they appointed an umpire to adjudicate on the Tasmanian submission, and Mr Carter has clearly put a lot of thought in to that, but in the end it seems they have effectively said: ‘thanks very much Colin for your work, but please don’t be too upset – we’re ignoring it’.

What they should have done, in my opinion, was firstly ignore what McGuire had said, adopt Mr Carter’s report, get a Tassie team up and running no later than 2026, and if in the future it is shown there is a need for a new stadium in Hobart, address that matter when there is time to give it proper consideration and planning. It is still not too late to make that decision.

Peter Williams is a former player and chairman of the Launceston Football Club and served in administration with the Tasmanian Football League.