Sue Hickey, Glenorchy's deputy mayor and independent candidate in coming election, speaks about North Chigwell

Photo:  Sue Hickey (centre), with South Hobart president Victoria Morton and Glenorchy Knights president Paul Woodham, while pressing the flesh at KGV Park recently. [PlessPix] 

Independent candidate for Clark, Sue Hickey, who is also deputy mayor of the Glenorchy City Council, recently attended a football match at KGV Park.

I took the opportunity to interview her about the fiasco that was supposed to be the North Chigwell football hub.

You may recall that Andrew Wilkie obtained Commonwealth finding of $12.8 million for the project five years ago and very little has happened since then.

Walter Pless:  Do you think sport is important in the community?

Sue Hickey:  I think sport is critical for physical and mental health.  I’m not a good example of it, but I do know that for many disadvantaged communities it’s one of the major factors in connecting people, and I also love that spirit of volunteering that comes with sport, where you have families coming in and supporting generations of other people’s families to get them active, and when they can’t afford things, they pass on boots or help out with a bit of money to join the club.

That is critical.  And you know volunteers are the glue between governments.  Governments can’t do everything, and a lot of things they don’t do very well, but I think real people helping other people is one of the best things about society.

WP:  But what has happened to that grant of $12.8 million?  We’ve got two pitches, which we’ve always had at North Chigwell, and little else.

SH:  And lights, and they’ve had the drainage fixed.

I totally agree with you, though.  Before I came onto the Council, I believe Andrew Wilkie had a $12.8 million donation to Council, or managed to get those funds from the Commonwealth, and this is an example of where there’s not a lot of negotiation with Council, so there was no allowance for operating costs, depreciation and maintenance, so the Council at the time was very bound up with its own financial problems.

To me, that took far too long to resolve, so during that hiatus, while they were trying to work out how they were going to do this, and also split some of the funds for KGV, that took a long time to get renegotiated with the Commonwealth Government.

Totally unacceptable as far as I’m concerned.

However, we had a great director come on board and he has really got momentum and things moving.

Having said that, it has been a slow process and, of course, all the costs have blown out.

Trying to get construction people has been near impossible, but I do know that on Monday [26 February 2024.  I won’t be there because of the election] it will be going to Council to get a tender hopefully approved and then construction should be done on the club rooms within 12 months and, obviously, a little longer with the car parks and things like that.

But, I totally empathise.  I’ve been out there.  I know how busy that space is.  I know how families rely on it for that activity and I just love seeing the element of multi-culturalism, the blending of communities, and I am fully supportive of that having an equitable distribution of our funds.

All I can do is apologise.  If I had a magic wand, we’d have everything you want, but that isn’t the way the world operates, and these things were negotiated five years ago and, as I say, I can’t explain why it took so long to get off the ground.

But, I do think it’ll be much, much nicer than they’ve had to put up with, but certainly, it’s not going to be, probably, what they first expected.