SOUTH AUSTRALIAN KIDS TEACHING KIDS CONFERENCE

Mrs VLAHOS (Taylor) (15:35): I rise to speak about a conference that I had the good pleasure to address yesterday morning on behalf of the Premier. It is a conference that has been held in Adelaide for a number of years, the South Australian Kids Teaching Kids Conference at the Adelaide Convention Centre. This conference is particularly important because it involves the Department of Water and around 350 students from around our state.

The new Chief Executive of the Department for Water, Scott Ashby, also officially launched the conference with me yesterday. The conference is a fantastic school-based event which is very inspiring to young people because they are learning to care for their local environment in a very proactive and practical way which imparts information throughout their community.

Over the last two days, 350 students from years 5 to 11 from around 40 schools across the state, particularly from country South Australia, participated in the Kids Teaching Kids Conference. This conference has a proud history in South Australia and it is in its fourth year of being held here in Adelaide. Each year Kids Teaching Kids is a sellout event, and the children often go across to the national and international events that this conference is associated with. So, it is a wonderful achievement for our state.

The South Australian government is a big fan of the conference and we have supported it with sponsorship over a number of years. That is because we believe in the power of young people and that the power of learning is inherently great in the way it changes the way we look at the environment and the way each and every one of us can protect it. Not only is it for us to enjoy and appreciate here and now, but we are also the guardians for the future and for our children's future.

In my opinion, giving young people the right to have a say and to have the power to make changes in our community is a very important thing. South Australia's school curriculum gives us many great opportunities to explore different ways our young people can learn, and the way Kids Teaching Kids allows children to learn about the environment is a terrific example of this.

Here in South Australia we are also leading the country in being clean and green. We have a great recycling program, where thousands of plastics are recycled each year, cutting down on rubbish and the use of natural resources. We are also planting native trees and plants with our Million Trees Program, which recently celebrated the planting of its two-millionth seedling. We are also doing our bit to save water and to help protect the vitality of the important River Murray system.

For me, teaching kids really stands for what I believe in; in particular, sharing our knowledge with other people in the community. I have two young children and it makes me very proud to see them taking on the challenges and doing their bit to protect the environment in the south Parklands with their school at Sturt Street. I was pleased yesterday that the children attending the Kids Teaching Kids Conference would have an opportunity to do this today, and yesterday, and beyond into the future.

They have had an extremely busy two days and they will have had a chance to be teachers themselves. Yesterday at the Convention Centre they had the opportunity to talk to and have questions with four expert environmental people and ask questions about the river health and climate change. Seventeen schools spent many hours researching environmental topics this year, and they will be presented to their peers, on everything from water use to the River Murray to whales. They will even be performing some cooking demonstrations, which show the benefits of growing your own food and how it is good for the environment as well as for your body.

Today they will travel to Mount Barker to participate in an environmental project day, where they will be visiting the Laratinga Wetlands and a local water treatment facility. They will also get stuck into some hands-on activities, such as bird and bat box building, and talk about how the cars and houses of the future will impact on our carbon footprint, and sustainable cities and farms.

The sort of learning offered for Kids Teaching Kids has a lot of great benefits, not only for the students involved but also for teachers, parents, business and government. It gives children the chance to be empowered to learn with their heads, hearts and hands. In other words, they will be encouraged to think, feel and develop practical ways of looking at the challenges we are facing in our local environment, our state, and the world.

Kids Teaching Kids is all about kids. So, in closing, I would like to congratulate the children for being part of such an important event and for all the hard work they have put in preparing and researching their presentations for this exciting and fun conference and the organisers and teachers who made the conference possible.