SOUTHERN EXPRESSWAY

Mr BIGNELL (Mawson) (15:44): I rise today to update house on a very exciting project for Southern Adelaide and the Fleurieu Peninsula, that is, the duplication of the Southern Expressway. Last week the government let tenders for a detailed planning study (the process will be completed in August) to look at the best alignment for the duplication of the expressway. People who drive along the expressway will have noticed in the past few weeks engineers out there with their equipment looking at what is there at the moment and how best to deal with the duplication.

Because of its shortsighted approach the Liberal government in power at the time, which built this ridiculous one-way road that is a laughing stock around the world, did not even think about cutting out the cliff faces or making the bridges wide enough, and one of the things we have to do is replace nine road bridges and five footbridges that are simply too short to put two or three more lanes underneath them. So there is a lot of work to be done before the real work can actually begin. That will be late next year, with a completion date sometime in mid-2014, and it is something that people in the South are very much looking forward to. As I said before, it should have been done properly in the first place: it was not, and it will take a Labor government to fix this ridiculous piece of infrastructure, for which the Liberals will always stand condemned.

Last week I hosted the first meeting of the Southern Expressway Jobs Task Force. During the election campaign the Minister for Transport announced that I would chair this task force, which is aimed at ensuring that at least half the 1,500 jobs created during the construction phase of the Southern Expressway go to people living in the South, and to local contractors. That is something which, with a long lead-in time, we are confident we will be able to achieve.

It was a very good first meeting. We had the Minister for Transport—minister Conlon, the Minister for the Southern Suburbs—minister Hill, Sue McCormick, director of the Office for the Southern Suburbs, Paul Gelston, project director of the Office of Major Projects and Infrastructure, Penny Crocker, head of Southern Knowledge Transfer at Flinders University, Peter Nolan, chief executive officer of the Civil Contractors Federation, Mark Searle, the chief executive officer of the City of Marion, and Glenn Hickling, the economic development officer at the City of Onkaparinga.

The meeting aimed to bring everyone around the table so that we could gather everyone's networks and knowledge, and discuss how we would approach it to ensure that we really do maximise the amount of jobs that go to people and businesses in the South. I was very pleased at the input we had from these people, who have so much knowledge and such great connections to people in the South, whether it be through the trade schools or employment agencies, or people like the Southern Business Success Group. We really need to tap into those areas.

One thing we found out through major projects such as the desalination plant and the upcoming extension of the Seaford railway line was that there was not necessarily a great deal of knowledge in the South about how to tender for jobs. So, one of the things they have been doing is running training programs for companies in the South on how to write tender documents, and perhaps not aim for the big company at the top who has won the overall tender but maybe go in at level two or three and apply for jobs at that level. It seems to be something that did not work initially with the desalination plant but is working now through some education, so I congratulate all those people, who have already done some fantastic work at that level. We look forward to implementing the things they already know into the Southern Expressway project.

We are also going to learn from what happened on the Northern Expressway, and in our next meeting will have the project officer from the Northern Expressway come and explain to us what went well and what did not go so well. There is no point in us inventing everything; if someone already has a good formula out there we would be only to happy to use it. However, we will also look at innovative ways to ensure that the lion's share of the jobs go to people in the South.

Another exciting thing that came out of last week's meeting was that Flinders University students will be able to team up and do their placements on the Southern Expressway. This is a great thing for university students, to be able to go to something in their own backyard and learn on the job; because this will not be the only job, after this the Darlington interchange will be built, so we hope there will be years and years of work for these people.