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Kobelke rejects Subi upgrade - The West Australian
Kobelke rejects Subi upgrade
25th May 2007, 6:30 WST
Sport and Recreation Minister John Kobelke has ruled out providing more public funding to patch up Subiaco Oval, leaving the WA Football Commission to foot a huge bill to upgrade the venue if it scuttles plans for an $850 million multipurpose stadium.
And in comments which further restrict the stadium options available to football’s governing body, Mr Kobelke said he accepted the findings of the Langoulant task force that the football commission’s $447 million proposal to rebuild Subiaco Oval did not stack up against the preferred options of building a stadium at Kitchener Park or East Perth.
But last night there were suggestions the Government could be split on the issue, with Health Minister Jim McGinty questioning whether the money would be better spent building a new children’s hospital.
“Do we want to spend $800 million on providing 16,000 extra seats at the football or is a new children’s hospital more important,” Mr McGinty said.
Mr Kobelke said the Government had set up the stadium task force two years ago to stop individual sports coming to government for more funding and he was not about to back away from that objective.
“The blueprint the task force has presented is a golden opportunity, not only for the people of WA to have a world-class stadium, but for the major sports to take advantage of that,” Mr Kobelke said.
“If they let this opportunity go by, then I don’t think they’re going to be looked on kindly by this Government, any future government or the people of WA if they come knocking on doors with their hands out saying, ‘we need tens of millions of dollars to prop up our stadium, our sport, because we haven’t been able to manage it’.
“I think people need to understand that the whole process of establishing the task force . . . was based on the problem we’ve had here for years in WA that major stadia have been built with substantial support from the State Government with undertakings that those sports will not come back for more money five or 10 years later.
“We’re not about to do a backflip and say let’s go back to the old way.”
Mr Kobelke’s comments mean the football commission has no fall-back if football officials torpedo the new stadium plan by refusing to move from Subiaco Oval.
The football commission sought $40 million from the Government in 2005 to upgrade Subiaco Oval before presenting the task force with a $235 million redevelopment. That proposal was replaced by a $447 million plan to rebuild most of the stadium.
Asked yesterday if the football commission could fund the improvements required at Subiaco Oval without Government help, chief executive Wayne Bradshaw said: “We have difficulty, any sport has difficulty, doing major capital projects.”
He said the football commission’s immediate focus would be to assess the task force’s financial modelling, including the claim that moving to a new stadium would generate an extra $3 million in revenue for football.
MARK DRUMMOND
CHIEF REPORTER