Football far from Tasmania’s top priority
WHAT are the state government’s priorities? Health or sport?
If the government is able to find $10m a year for 10 seasons for a Tasmanian AFL team, can it then find another $10m a year to fix a failing health system, or will the cupboard be bare?
On July 23, ABC News reported that parents were forced to take their 13year-old son to hospital in a taxi, due to ramping meaning no ambulances were available.
In the taxi, the boy stopped breathing and needed CPR from his mother, assisted by two passers-by.
There is repeated anecdotal evidence of health emergencies where people have had to find their own way to hospital in similar circumstances. If we can’t call an ambulance, we may not live to watch 10 years of football! Elizabeth Osborne
North Hobart
TEAM LONG OVERDUE
On ABC’s National Grandstand on July 24, they made a comment that a Tasmanian team will fall over because the government will get tired of financial support, so the quest for a team is doomed.
What a disgraceful comment that was not challenged by the other hosts.
I immediately texted that for 21 years we have bailed out two Victorian clubs and currently pay $10m+ a year to them plus $500,000 to AFL Tasmania and we are now going to give it to a Tasmanian team.
Their response over the next 45 minutes was not to respond.
Pathetic and shows what we have had to fight for over the past 32 years. Sorry, we are having this team. Show your support for what is right, what we have proved is financially sustainable and long overdue.
Russell Hanson
Lindisfarne
DON’T BE DROP-KICKS
Whether it’s the tailored suit-wearing CEO of the Australia Football Leech – sorry, League – or the cashpoor mainland footy clubs looking to soak up, or sponge off, even more of the liquid assets known to Tasmanians as their taxes, the AFL and others now have the effrontery to demand a multimillion-dollar stadium – to be built at the expense of Tasmania’s taxpayers – in return for its munificent benevolence in granting Tasmania its own representative AFL football club.
It’s obvious the AFL is self-serving and wants to keep its own cash-cows feeding in whichever way they can off the greener pastures they’ve found in Tasmania, and that it would rather see Tasmanians invest in a game of let’s kick a ball than in their own state’s critically under-resourced health system.
I just hope our politicians don’t prove themselves to be drop-kicks by punting for a kick-a-ball stadium too, instead of providing more – and much needed – financial support for their state’s ageing public hospitals and their underpaid and overworked staff.
Michael McCall Primrose Sands
IN OUR OWN BACKYARD
Further to the Mercury (“It’s Stadium or Bust”, July 23) I say bust.
Where is the community consultation? Who does this government really represent?
Interstate AFL representatives who want to use local funding for their stadium ideas should not even get a look in.
How about Tasmanians getting a say about their own backyard. Deborah Bordeau
Mount Stuart
WHY NOT QUEENBOROUGH?
So, the AFL wants a new football stadium at Macquarie Point (Mercury, July 23).
Our government proposes Regatta Point.
Footy’s spiritual home is North Hobart Oval. Bellerive is the current ground. York Park is in Launceston, not Hobart. KGV at Glenorchy – not even on the table.
Options, options, options!
Why not throw Queenborough into the ring. Heaps of surrounding land to add a monster carpark.
I used to love sitting high in that wonderful hedge as a wee 1960s kid. Yep, the Tassie Mudcakes, I say! Nailed it!
Steve Bailey
Glenorchy
DUMBER AND DUMBER
We can have an AFL team if we buy an AFL stadium in plainspeak is blackmail.
I, like New Zealand and the rest of the world, have no interest in AFL.
I can’t believe that after spending over half a billion dollars on cobbling together a reno on the RHH we are using ambulances as hospital beds and not for their intended purpose, forcing patients to get a taxi!
Instead of removing the pods in front of the RHH, which we were assured were only temporary, they are installing more, hoping no one will notice.
We need to build a stadium like we need a hole in the head.
We are spending billions on road repairs because we don’t have an efficient rail system to take B-doubles and triples off our roads.
The list gets dumber and dumber. Kennett and McLachlan should forget about scamming us and get real jobs. Sid Abraham
New Town