CHRIS THOMSON
OPINION: I have two things in common with high-profile AFL convert Karmichael Hunt who booted his first AFL goal to much celebration on the Gold Coast last night.
Like me, Special K was raised in the outer Brisbane suburb of Algester. And like me, as a boy the Kiwi immigrant played his first rugby league game in this country with the mighty Southern Suburbs Magpies.
And there the comparison ends.
For unlike he, I shall never don the hallowed maroon jersey of the greatest rugby league team the world has ever seen – Queensland.
Nor shall I ever get to wind up and dob my inaugural AFL goal from 55-metres out at Carrara Stadium as Hunt did last night.
More disturbingly, I will not see a decent AFL stadium built in my adopted hometown of Perth any time soon that’s the equal of the pictured ground where Hunt launched his prodigious punt.
Why does a holiday town a third the size of Perth and indifferent to AFL have a better footy stadium than the footy-mad WA capital?
I posed this question on Twitter last night, and an instantaneous response hit the nail on the head.
“Maybe their government got off their butt and built one,” fired Todd AKA Perthstorm.
Nilfiskvacuumdr AKA Andy Hawcroft shed further light on the situation.
“Queensland knows what tourism needs, WA only knows about dirty big holes in the ground,” Nilfiskvacuumdr lamented.
It’s hard to disagree with either tweeter.
But also perhaps, Queensland, like Hunt and his punt, is more willing to wind up and go for it.
Me and my mate Snackman were fortunate enough to be at the inaugural Brisbane Bears game at a rudimentary Carrara in 1987 where the only available parking for his Ford Cortina was on an adjacent boggy paddock in the middle of nowhere.
The traffic that clogged the single-lane access road resembled the final scene from A Field of Dreams where a baseball diamond made by a farmer in an Iowa cornfield miraculously attracts his late baseball star father, the Chicago Black Sox and a massive crowd.
Few at Carrara in 1987 knew the rules of the Mexican hatdance unfolding before us. The Bears lost to their eventual merger partners the Fitzroy Lions, and the Cortina got bogged before the long drive back to Brisbane.
But the match signalled the arrival of a new sport that at the peak of the Brisbane Lions’ triple-flag success 15 years later would rival rugby league for popularity north of the border.
As the Field of Dreams farmer was advised by a supenatural voice during the movie: ‘If you build it, he [his late baseballer dad] will come’.
This is often misquoted as: ‘If you build it, they will come’ – which is more convenient for this piece.
Anyhoo, since 2005 Carrara has received its massive makeover, Brisbane’s piecemeal Gabba has morphed into a footballer’s paradise, and the jaded Lang Park cauldron transformed into the world’s best rugby ground.
Over the same period, WA has spent $1.7 million on a major stadia report that now gathers dust while some Subiaco patrons still brave butt-splinters from the remaining wooden benches.
After five years of dithering, in 2008 the then Labor government accepted one of the report’s recommendations to demolish Subi and build the new stadium next door at Kitchener Park.
This would have seen a world-class footy and cricket stadium built in Perth by 2016.
However, after Labor was ousted, new premier Colin Barnett scrapped the Subiaco plans and has only recently announced a tentative preference for a stadium at Burswood.
This is paralysis by analysis and way too risk-averse for a state whose two AFL teams would have no trouble filling the stadium regularly.
A word of advice from the Twitter community, Mr Barnett:
Take a leaf from the Book of Karmichael and JUST DO IT.
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