Colours and Circles Art Exhibition

Dr HARVEY (Newland) (15:32): It was a great privilege to be invited to the Colours and Circles art exhibition put on by the Modbury Special School at the Department for Education building in the city last Friday. I was very pleased to attend along with the Minister for Education as well as the member for Florey. I would like very much to congratulate the staff, especially Elizabeth Blanco, who does the art with the children and who organised the wonderful display.

I was taken through the wide range of art that was put together by the students and that ranged from different drawings of faces by students from some of the annexes, in places like the Highbury Primary School, to a decorated trampoline. I must admit that I had to double-take to realise that it was in fact a trampoline. It was incredible work on their part. There were also some incredible stories behind the different pieces of art that were there.

For example, there is a student, who is very good with words and writing, who colours in with calligraphy. That is something he does and it is something he does all the time. He had coloured in a picture with different colours in beautiful different patterns, which were really quite incredible. There were also a number of touching stories behind some of the other pieces of art that were wonderful achievements for those students, and the teachers who showed me around were incredibly proud that a child was able to produce something so great.

The Modbury Special School does a wonderful job of providing so many opportunities to empower many children in our community to reach their full potential. I would like very much to congratulate the principal, Cam Wright; the acting principal, Ginny Pyatt; the chairperson of the governing council, Maggie Yarak; and other staff, parents and volunteers on the amazing and important work they do.

At the weekend, I also attended the Friends of Anstey Hill planting day in the Anstey Hill Recreation Park. This was an important day, and the group managed to attract almost 40 volunteers, which was very good. They replanted shrubs, native plants and native grasses down in the valley between the Silver Mine Track and Kaurna Way. The Friends of Anstey Hill is a great local community organisation that supports revegetation and conservation in the Anstey Hill Recreation Park.

They provide many thousands of hours of work in the park, ultimately saving the government a great deal of money, for the benefit of the local environment and community. Particularly important, and in stark contrast, after the previous government's slash and burn of the number of park rangers—from over 300 in 2002 to only 93 in 2018—on this side we are committed to increasing the number of park rangers right across our parks.

I would lastly like to touch on the Fast Cats Pedal Prix club, an important local club, and congratulate them on the work they do. I congratulate both the open competitors as well as the school competitors on their performance in the Pedal Prix competition on the weekend at Victoria Park. It started out as a school group a number of years ago, and now it includes a number of masters competitors in the open competition with four student bikes and four open bikes.

A couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to attend one of their Tuesday evening training and maintenance nights and see firsthand the work they do, which includes maintaining the bikes and all the hands-on skills around that as well as the quite high performance fitness training provided to students and more experienced competitors. It is a fantastic way of engaging so many local people in a local club where they can gain lots of different skills and contribute to the community overall.