The Sports Minister needs to table the full costings that have priced a new stadium in the city at close to $3 billion to demonstrate how the "bizarre" and politically motivated figure was calculated, Opposition Leader Elizabeth Lee says.
The cost of a new 30,000-seat stadium in Civic would be between $2.128 billion and $2.9 billion, figures released by Yvette Berry on Monday showed.
Independent ACT senator David Pocock said he found the estimates extraordinary and questioned how realistic the costings were.
"I have never seen a government work so hard to kill off an idea that was theirs in the first place," Senator Pocock said.
The figure represents a hike of almost 400 per cent on a cost estimate of $582 million presented in a 2021 feasibility study for a city centre stadium.
Independents for Canberra leader Thomas Emerson said the estimates were highly questionable and could surely only have been based on a design that was chosen to be prohibitively expensive.
"This is timely justification for not having taken any concrete steps to build a new stadium despite seven feasibility studies spread over many years showing that a stadium is, indeed, feasible," Mr Emerson said.
"The Civic site is clearly the most compelling option but a captain's call from the Chief Minister has deemed it unsuitable, presumably to strengthen the case for a SimCity vision of a Bruce health precinct where co-locating a stadium with a hospital somehow makes sense."
Ms Lee said the costings were downright bizarre and without basis.
"The Deputy Chief minister must explain where the 400 per cent increase has come from or if she has misled the Assembly and made up the figure without any basis," Ms Lee said.
"If infrastructure costs have indeed increased by 400 per cent in three years as claimed by the Minister then it is incumbent on the Chief Minister to tell Canberrans how he will now fund his infrastructure pipeline of work previously costed at over $8.5billion. Based on Ms Berry's updated costings, this equates to $34billion of total infrastructure spending.
"This response from the Minister highlights that the Labor-Greens government know their Bruce stadium plan is woefully inadequate and does not have the support of the sporting codes or the community."
Ms Lee said Ms Berry needed to table the full costings to provide clarity and transparency to the public.
"It is clear this response is politically motivated and a desperate move from a government that is out of touch, out of ideas, and struggling to sell Canberrans on their poorly conceived policies," Ms Lee said.
Senator Pocock said the ACT government was not doing the work to put compelling funding bids to the Commonwealth to secure support for a stadium project.
The biggest barrier to the ACT receiving more federal infrastructure funding was the lack of any detailed business case put forward by the ACT government, he said.
"... "Canberrans don't want gold-plated seats, they just want a great venue where they can watch sport and their favourite bands," Senator Pocock said.
"The vision for Canberra I worked on with our community and released last year pulls together a stadium and convention centre as well as land for new housing in the city that offsets most of the development costs, together with a plan to bury Parkes Way and finally connect the City to the Lake.
"We need vision, we need to be bold, and we need to get on with making the case and funding the investments in our city's future rather than this cycle of sabotaging our own ideas as the ACT Government seems to do time and again."
Mr Emerson, who previously worked for Senator Pocock, said Canberrans were "smart enough to see through the spin and realise that, although the Commonwealth looked ready to fund a new stadium for Canberra this year, the ACT government failed to put forward a fundable plan".
with Chris Dutton
