OSBORNE COMMUNITY CLUB

Dr CLOSE (Port Adelaide) (15:35): I rise today to inform the house about a wonderful club operating in my electorate—the Osborne Over 50s. I want to let you know about it because it is yet another example of the health and liveliness of our community.

There has been much made of the fear in declining community activity and volunteering and in people just getting out of their houses and interacting. That concern is legitimate and yet, wherever I go in the Port Adelaide electorate, I see abundant evidence that people in my community are looking after each other and are having fun doing it.

The Osborne Over 50s is a great example. It is an extraordinarily lively club with activities available for every day of the week. These activities are all about having fun and cover physical exercise, the mental challenges of complex games and also excursions.

The club meets in the Osborne Community Hall and provides a place for people from all around the Lefevre Peninsula to meet up and enjoy themselves. The diversity of the peninsula community is well represented in the club with people who have just moved in and people who can trace their families back for four generations in the Port Adelaide area. There is unity too in the love of the area, the desire to feel safe and in a healthy environment, the caring for the next generations and the desire to see our local community prosper.

When I visited recently, we had a great conversation about the need for the impact on the peninsula of increasing exports to be carefully managed. It is a narrow piece of land with many different uses trying to exist alongside each other. The peninsula is home to Outer Harbor, which means many trucks and trains moving freight with all the attendant road safety, air quality and noise issues. There is also heavy and light industry, older infrastructure and modern shipbuilding, which is not only highly significant to the South Australian economy but also employs many locals.

On the environment front, the peninsula is surrounded by the dolphin sanctuary and has a high-quality conservation reserve at the tip. It is also the home of thousands of people. All of these land uses need to be able to coexist in a very small area, and the discussion we had at the Over 50s was very much about how to make sure that the residents are central to the way that the area is managed. I thank the people of the club for welcoming me, and I commend them on their lively and active club and their genuine engagement with their community.