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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2010-05-25 Daily Xml
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ADELAIDE OVAL

Mr MARSHALL (Norwood) (15:38): It is a great pleasure to rise to talk today about a topic that we have not discussed much lately, that is, the Adelaide Oval redevelopment. Some people on my side are angry at the government and, indeed, the Treasurer's announcement earlier today in the house—and they are justified, I think, in being angry. This government went to the people of South Australia with a position. It has backflipped ever since, and we believe, unequivocally, that the government has misled the people of South Australia. But I am not angry like the rest of the Liberal people: I am just extremely interested in how this is actually going to unfold over the coming days and weeks.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Just to clarify—not angry, but interested?

Mr MARSHALL: Not angry, Madam Deputy Speaker, but just very interested. By way of clearly setting out the chronology of my interest in this topic, with your indulgence, I will run through some of the most pertinent dates relating to this topic.

First, we need to go right the way back to early 2008. Indeed, it was the Liberal Party which put forward the concept of the redevelopment of the City West precinct and the establishment of a covered city stadium for football, bringing football out of West Lakes and into the city precinct. Now, did the government at the time say, 'Good idea. Excellent idea. We support this'? No. It said that it was a terrible idea, that it would bankrupt the state, that it would jeopardise our AAA credit rating and that it was a particularly bad idea.

Mr Gardner: Who said that?

Mr MARSHALL: They all did. They all said that it was a particularly bad idea. Well, I thought that it was a fantastic idea. The redevelopment of the whole City West precinct as part of a master plan importantly had a covered stadium for football. As a party, we then went out to get independent costings on our proposal; and, in fact, we went to Stephen Baker (a former treasurer of South Australia) and Adam Steinhardt, who put forward the independent Baker Steinhardt report, which looked at various options for this development and, in particular, the concept of a covered city stadium—a city stadium that would have 50,000 seats for a range of sporting and cultural events.

Importantly, this stadium that we were proposing did not take the number of stadia that we have in South Australia from two down to one: it kept the status at two, which I think is important and visionary for South Australia. As I said, the government thought that it was a terrible idea. We thought that it was a good idea, so much so that, in the lead-up to the election, we reannounced it and reconfirmed our commitment to the Riverside redevelopment—again, a 50,000 seat under-cover stadium with 5,000 car parks and bringing the interstate rail terminal into the city. This was going to cost us $800 million for the covered stadium, and it would be FIFA compliant.

It was a good plan and one which was valued not only by us Liberals; in fact, it was actually valued by the people of South Australia. In fact, on the Adelaidenow site (which ran a lot of this story) as high as 80 per cent of people in South Australia favoured this concept, so how did the government respond to this? The government did not say, 'Well, look; you guys have come up with a great idea'; it continued to tell us that it was a bad idea and that South Australia could not afford it.

However, soon thereafter—in fact, not that long at all—on 2 December the Premier said, 'We are going to develop the Adelaide Oval, and, in fact, we've been working on this plan for more than six months.' It is hard to believe that, because members opposite were so divisive and deriding of our plan. They did not want it at all, but in their arrogance they said that it had to proceed with this plan. After the election the Premier, who went to the people with his great Adelaide Oval redevelopment plan, again said, 'Not a cent more and not one day longer.'

What do we have now? We do not know how much this is going to cost, we do not know when the SMA is going to come down with its scope and proposal, we do not know the boundaries of the precinct, we do not know whether the ACC will give approval to proceed with the development, we do not know the federal government input to the project, we do not know whether or not it will be FIFA compliant, we do not know whether there will be car parks and we do not know the cost of the project yet to be borne by the state government. We do not know much at all. We are waiting with great interest.

Time expired.

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