On the Same Wave Initiative

The Hon. P. CAICA (Colton) (15:16): Several weeks ago, I was fortunate enough, along with my wife, Annabel, to attend the West Beach Surf Life Saving Club, a fantastic lifesaving club of which I was a member many, many years ago for a period of time. I attended with the candidate for Colton, Angela Vaughan, and also in attendance was the member for Morialta. What we were doing there that night was to recognise, acknowledge and celebrate a very good program, a component of a Living In Harmony initiative called On the Same Wave. It is a partnership between the various surf lifesaving clubs, Surf Life Saving Australia and the Australian government's department of immigration and citizenship.

The program is about engaging emerging communities in surf lifesaving. Deputy Speaker, you would be aware that, traditionally, it has been people from emerging communities who have been over-represented in drownings in South Australia; indeed, across Australia. This program is meant to provide—and it does—support to young Australians of all backgrounds to become part of a beach experience and to engage with surf lifesaving around Australia.

The program has been adopted in South Australia since 2009. The West Beach Surf Life Saving Club has been working in partnership with Surf Life Saving SA to help reduce beach fatalities and injuries amongst the state's growing migrant and refugee population. The On the Same Wave initiative is designed to engage with South Australians from CALD backgrounds and provide them with potentially life-saving surf safety education in their primary language.

On any fair assessment, the work of Surf Life Saving through West Beach Surf Life Saving Club and the other clubs, underpinned by the support of Surf Life Saving SA, has been an outstanding success. You would have loved this function, Deputy Speaker.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Schnitzels?

The Hon. P. CAICA: There were no schnitzels, but what there was, on a very cold night, was a variety of what I call comfort food, so stews, casseroles, halal-type food with various curries and the like, and it was fantastic. The food was fantastic. The only thing better than the food was the company that we were able to share at this event.

West Beach Surf Life Saving Club is very proud of their initiative, and so they should be. You would understand, Deputy Speaker, that every initiative needs a champion in each of the clubs for it to be able to thrive, and in this case we have a man called Peter Taylor from the West Beach Surf Life Saving Club. He is an outstanding human being who is committed to ensuring that we engage people from our emerging communities and do it in such a way that they are provided with the life skills, beach skills and surf skills to be able to not only contribute to surf lifesaving in South Australia but to take that information and that knowledge back to their communities to ensure that each and every one of them becomes more aware about opportunities that exist and how they can be part of ensuring that we have a better approach to safety on our beaches.

As I said, it was a great event. The West Beach Surf Life Saving Club has also been working with the Thebarton Senior College. Those who have visited the Thebarton Senior College would know that that is an outstanding institution, too. It is a very good college to visit, with a significant number of people from our emerging communities. There are some younger ones but generally a lot of adult education. The West Beach Surf Life Saving Club is working with the Thebarton Senior College.

This college, as you would be aware, Deputy Speaker, is the only adult new-arrivals program provider in South Australia. The new arrivals program is an intensive English-language acquisition course for newly arrived adult migrant and refugee students. The focus of the program is to provide non-English speaking students with the level of language proficiency needed to undertake future SACE studies. Mathematics, science and computing are integral to the curriculum, which also has a language emphasis.

The reason I am focusing on this particular point is that that program provides the basis for the transition through to the learnings and skills acquisitions required for surf lifesaving. Since 2009, West Beach has been training students to become members of the surf lifesaving family by providing training and first aid, advanced resuscitation, the radio certificate and, most importantly, the bronze medallion.

In the 2010-11 seasons, we had the first group of South Australians from our emerging communities pass the bronze medallion certificate. It took them 18 months to achieve their goal, with most of them never having been in the ocean before and unable to swim. It is an outstanding achievement and one that, as South Australians, we should all be very proud of. I go back to the point I made about Peter Taylor and the work he has done. West Beach Surf Life Saving Club can be proud, and the people of South Australia can be proud of the work that the West Beach Surf Life Saving Club does.