THE AFL has left the door ajar for Tasmania to show it can support its own national footy team.
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After years of former CEO Andrew Demetriou finding various ways to say no, not ever, certainly not on his watch, his successor, Gillon McLachlan, believes Tasmania deserves its own team. He questioned whether we had the financial means to support one, at the rate of $45 million a year.
The ball, as it were, is now in Tasmania's quarter. It is up to us to show how other contemporary clubs like Greater Western Sydney have survived with a bottomless pit of AFL and other sponsorship money, plus special treatment with the draft and new recruits.
The AFL poured $100 million into a Sydney stadium while a consortium developed the Carrara stadium in Queensland for the Gold Coast Suns into a 25,000-seat venue, with plans to redevelop it into a 40,000-seat stadium for the 2018 Commonwealth Games.
In Sydney a GWS home game attracts a crowd of about 10,000. In Launceston it's 15,000 or so. As respected economist Saul Eslake said this week, if five million Victorians can support 10 AFL clubs, there is no reason why 500,000 Tasmanians can't support one.
It is up to Tasmania to prosecute its case, and perhaps for the AFL locally to realise the futility in trying to develop a home of AFL footy at both ends of the state.
We may be able to prove Mr McLachlan wrong on the economics of a single team, but not if the local money is being spread too thinly between North and South.
To this end it is always instructive to listen to a host of experts speak about an end to parochialism in one breath, only to plunge into the familiar territory of parochialism in the next.
Sooner or later hard heads will have to prevail, so that our civic and political leaders can rise above the tribal nature of Tasmania and talk about matters of state.