BAROSSA VALLEY AND MCLAREN VALE

Mr BIGNELL (Mawson) (15:33): I rise again today to talk about the protection of McLaren Vale and the Barossa Valley. An important milestone was reached last Friday with the closure of submissions for comments on the proposed legislation. The government received more than 200 submissions, which is a massive number. It shows the depth of concern that people in both regions—and people who are not even from those regions—have for McLaren Vale and the Barossa Valley. There are so many people who want to preserve what we have and to stop the agricultural land there from being covered over by housing and shopping malls, etc.

I worked with the McLaren Vale Grape, Wine and Tourism Association on its submission. There was a group of about a dozen of us who met every Monday night for a few weeks, and it was great to see the community come together. The Friends of Willunga Basin also put in a submission, which I endorse, and the Southern Community Coalition did its own submission. So there were individuals and groups who put in submissions, and there were groups who came together to put in submissions that represented all the views of the various groups.

At times like this it is really heartening to see human nature at its best, where people did chip in and did spend the time and the considerable effort that is required to make their voices heard, because this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. We usually see this sort of community spirit after a disaster like a flood or a bushfire; we saw it here, and it was great to see. I believe what we have done is to prevent a disaster, and that disaster would have been for this land to have been lost to suburbia.

I put in my own submission, which ran to a bit over 20 pages in the end, and it is reflective of my experiences in the past six or seven years in McLaren Vale and the things that I have picked up down there, but also talking to the people in the Barossa who I brought on board two years ago. There has been a group of seven of us who have worked very closely with levels of bureaucracy within the state government. We have had some very good meetings with ministers, such as the Minister for Infrastructure, the former minister for planning Paul Holloway, the current Minister for Planning and Deputy Premier, and the Premier himself. There has been a lot of interest shown by this government in reaching this decision, and I do want to thank those ministers who have been so generous with their time and efforts in making sure that we have reached this stage of the process.

To the members of our group from the Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale, David Gill, Jim Hullick, Dudley Brown, Margaret Lehmann, Anne Moroney, Jan Angas and Sam Holmes, I really do want to say thank you for all the time and effort over the past couple of years. Then there was the group in McLaren Vale under Tony Parkinson's stewardship, which included Jerry Keyte, Corrina Wright, Jock Harvey, Marc Allgrove, James Hook, Stephanie Johnston, Drew Noon, Elizabeth Tasker, Toby Bekkers, Sami Gilligan and many others. I am sure I may have left a few off there, but I thank all of them for their efforts over the past few weeks.

Now that the government has all these submissions in, it is going to be a matter of going through them and then coming back to groups like the McLaren Vale Grape, Wine and Tourism Association to work out the next step. The government is hopeful of having legislation introduced—certainly introduced in the next session, but we would like to see that legislation through both houses by the end of the year.

I think there has been some goodwill shown by all sides and Independents in both houses of the parliament to see things move forward and to see these lands protected. This will ensure that not only do we have food security but also that the good open spaces where people can enjoy the lifestyle that so many of us who live in the area enjoy each day, along with those who visit our regions, whether from the city of Adelaide, other parts of the state, Australia or the many international visitors who come to McLaren Vale and the Barossa will continue for years and years to come.