Hobart’s Lord Mayor has hit back at claims she is just “looking for a fight” over an AFL High Performance training facility, while revealing she is ‘for an AFL team and stadium’.
Anna Reynolds made the announcement while speaking to Brent Costelloe and Tim Paine on SEN Tassie this morning.
“I am pro team as well and pro stadium, but we’ve got to be really careful about how we proceed with this debate,” the Lord Mayor said.
“If the stadium doesn’t stack up at Macquarie Point because of ‘nothing to do with Anna Reynolds’ … but because there was rushed planning decisions, who’s going to be the full guy for that?”
Reynolds called claims that she was “just looking for a fight” made by Stadia and Events Minister Nic Street “provocative and inaccurate”.
“We have to be calm and not be personal and make decisions that are free of political posturing and are actually factual and based on the evidence,” Reynolds said.
“This is a classic example of where the Premier and Minister Street’s recent statements about Hobart City Council are deliberately provocative and inaccurate.”
The Mayor suggested that the proposed AFL development should instead be shared across the Greater Hobart council areas and said calls from the four mayors to explore this as a group were ‘ignored’ by the state government.
“I don’t want to have a silly competition with Glenorchy and Kingborough and that’s why we wrote to Minister Street.”
“Unfortunately, he ignored that letter and chose to sort of come to each of us individually.”
Reynolds called on the State Government to release a 30-page commercial in confidence document that she says gave the council the exact information on what the AFL were looking for in a training facility.
“They do need a fenced site with a MCG sized field, plus ideally a second field, plus a 9,000 square metre building, which is about 2.2 acres worth of building.”
“That’s about a Coles supermarket size building, plus about 150 car spaces.”
“Based on that information, it was very clear that given the uses and the size of Cornelian Bay and Queens Domain, those sites weren’t suitable.”
The State Government is yet to publicly name any shortlisted sites for an AFL training facility.
When asked by hosts Brent Costelloe and Tim Paine why she is against a stadium in the city when “it’s not going to cost the Council a cent and is forecast to bring millions and millions of dollars into the local area each and every year”, Reynolds said she wants to “wait and see what the expert planning information shows”.
“There was a decision made to put it there without necessarily the investigations being done first,” Reynolds said.
“Now my read and my understanding of what people are doing behind the scenes is really struggling
to see a 23,000 seat facility on this site.”
“If it was a 10,000 seat facility, Entertainment Centre, Convention Centre, a completely different story and that’s always been my vision of Macquarie Point is a place with a big convention centre, entertainment centre for about 10,000 seats.”
“Now when you go to 23,000 seats and that’s been determined as it has to be that size, it has to have these facilities and that’s all in the AFL contract, it then potentially becomes a more challenging exercise.”
