Tell Him He’s Dreaming
I sat down and read through the Tasmanian Budget papers today before training.
Every year I do it with the same tiny piece of hope.
Maybe this will be the year there is finally some transformational thinking around football infrastructure in Tasmania.
Maybe this will be the year participation sport gets treated as something more than an afterthought.
Maybe somewhere buried in the hundreds of pages there will be a genuine surprise.
Some magical football pot of gold.
Instead, it was very much a “tell him he’s dreaming” moment.
Again.
And honestly, that feeling is becoming less surprising every year.
Because once again, the Budget papers reveal a Tasmania that thinks very strategically about elite sporting infrastructure and far less strategically about participation sport.
OMG the Money
The Budget confirms $567.8 million toward the Macquarie Point multi-purpose sporting and entertainment precinct.
That figure includes:
$331.4 million from the Tasmanian Government
$221.4 million from the Australian Government
$15 million from the AFL
And further borrowing support is already flagged beyond that.
When you actually stop and sit with the scale of those numbers, it is hard not to have the same reaction:
Oh my God, the money.
Not just the stadium itself.
The layers underneath it.
The planning.
The governance.
The authorities.
The venue structures.
The tourism integration.
The economic modelling.
The urban renewal language.
The long-term strategic protection.
And that is before revisiting the other AFL-linked spending Tasmania has already committed itself to over recent years:
AFL licence funding
the High Performance Centre
York Park upgrades
Dial Park upgrades
and now the stadium itself
At some point you stop debating whether Tasmania is serious about AFL investment.
Clearly it is.
Football Exists in a Different Conversation
Meanwhile football continues to grow quietly in the background.
Women and girls football keeps growing.
Junior football keeps growing.
Participation keeps growing.
Demand for facilities keeps growing.
But the infrastructure conversation around football still often feels stuck in survival mode.
Not transformational mode.
Survival mode.
The conversation is still about:
access to grounds
lighting
changerooms
training space
scheduling pressure
councils trying to keep up
and volunteers trying to stretch infrastructure further than it was ever designed to go
Football is one of the largest participation sports in Tasmania.
Yet it still often feels like it exists in a completely different funding universe to AFL.
That is the part football people are tired of pretending not to notice.
What the hell do participation sports actually need to do to get noticed in Tasmania?
Run naked through Salamanca Market juggling a soccer ball?
Actually no, scratch that.
That would probably “bring the game into disrepute” and land football on the front page of The Mercury for all the wrong reasons.
Because sometimes it genuinely feels like football can:
grow participation
grow women’s football
grow junior football
fill grounds
overload facilities
stretch volunteers to breaking point
…and still somehow remain politically peripheral.
Meanwhile other sports receive:
strategic infrastructure planning
dedicated authorities
coordinated investment
economic framing
and transformational public spending
as if their importance is simply accepted as fact.
That is the disconnect football people are increasingly struggling with.
Not jealousy.
Recognition.
Recognition that one of Tasmania’s largest participation sports still often feels like it exists outside the main conversation when the really serious money is being discussed.
The Grant Trap
And yes, football can apply for grants.
That line gets rolled out constantly.
But AFL can apply for grants too.
That is the bit people dance around.
Football often feels like it is permanently applying for help while AFL receives strategic infrastructure investment as a matter of policy.
One side gets transformational investment.
The other gets application forms.
One side gets long-term infrastructure planning.
The other gets told to be patient.
Again.
The Difference in Language
This is not an anti-AFL argument.
People are excited about the Devils.
The JackJumpers have been enormously important for Tasmania.
Elite sport absolutely creates identity, visibility and economic activity.
But reading these Budget papers, what struck me most was the difference in language surrounding different levels of sport.
Elite sport gets discussed as:
economic infrastructure
activation
investment
tourism
state growth
urban renewal
Participation sport gets discussed as:
community
wellbeing
inclusion
volunteering
participation
Both matter.
But only one of those categories consistently seems to attract transformational public investment.
And maybe that is the real divide sitting underneath all of this.
What Governments Choose to Build Around
Budgets are not just financial documents.
They are statements of priority.
They reveal what governments think matters enough to build systems around.
Reading this Budget, it is impossible not to conclude that Tasmania now has a sophisticated, coordinated, long-term strategy around elite sporting infrastructure.
What remains far less clear is whether Tasmania has anything resembling the same strategic ambition for participation sport infrastructure.
Because for most Tasmanians, sport is not a stadium.
It is something they actually play.
And increasingly, football people are looking at the scale of public investment flowing into elite infrastructure and asking a pretty reasonable question:
At what point does participation sport stop being something politicians praise in speeches and start becoming something they genuinely invest in?