Parts of the Western stand were built in the 1960’s. The toilet blocks are totally inadequate. It is debatable whether it meets all modern safety requirements which is the reason they pulled down a 30 year old 40k seat stadium and replaced it with a $850m over the top stadium to satisfy the SCG Trust.
Then they pulled down another 35k stadium that only needed a refurbishment because it didn’t suit an A-League team.
I don’t recall the same outcry about these waste of money excesses.
Now we have a stadium that has received no Government funding for decades, is more than 50 years old, is totally inadequate and undersized and currently averaging nearly 20k a game which is 90% capacity (better than any stadium in NSW and possibly Australia) and needs to be totally rebuilt, as Well as being in the centre of the greatest RL nursery in the world which supplies more players to the NRL.
Surely the rebuild is more than justified and the reported $900m for a rebuild is totally exaggerated and ludriculous. It is not just a new stadium, it is a major infrastructure investment for an area that is constantly neglected by Governments.
Why should Penrith be forced to share a home ground with an opposition club? No other club is. Playing full time out of Commbank would totally destroy the Penrith club. By your reckoning the other 8 clubs should all play out of either Allianz or Commbank. It just doesn’t work!
Your reasoning would mean there would be no improvements to any stadium inNSW ever again!
They don't have to if they don't want to, but that's not the relevant question. The relevant question is why should the taxpayer pay for an expensive superfluous stadium that's destine to be a white elephant?
Everything you want and need already exists, and nothing is stopping the Panthers from taking advantage of it except their own entitlement and sense of self-importance. Building another sub-50k, state of the art, rectangular stadium, when another opened 30mins away only four years ago, makes no sense from either a city planning or commercial perspective, especially not in the current economic or political environment.
From a government perspective stadiums are expensive public assets that exist to fill public needs, and that need is already more than adequately met in Western Sydney. Building another stadium for the benefit of a single tenant that refuses to use the existing infrastructure would be an insane waste of public resources.
It's not unreasonable to expect teams to share facilities, in fact most teams in the league are co-tenants with other professional teams, and the 9 AFL clubs have no trouble sharing their two centralised stadiums. What is totally unreasonable is expecting the taxpayer to underwrite stadiums for every team in the league.
Nothing is stopping the Panthers from continuing to use BluBet if they wish, however not one cent of public money more than it takes to maintain the facilities there should be wasted on BlueBet. If the Panthers want major upgrades to BlueBet, or a even a new stadium in Penrith, then they can take that financial burden on for themselves.
