Mawson Electorate

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL (Mawson) (15:24): Last week, many people in the seat of Mawson received a rude awakening from the Liberal Party of South Australia. These calls started at quarter past six in the morning, with the person on the other end asking how they thought South Australia was going. Most people down in Aldinga and other parts of the electorate of Mawson think that South Australia, and in particular their local area, is not going that well. To be woken by the party that has done so much damage to Aldinga, McLaren Vale, Kangaroo Island and the rest of the western side of the Fleurieu Peninsula was particularly insulting.

In this survey, they asked a question about how I was going. I was quite pleased that a lot of the feedback I had in my office was that I was doing a good job standing up for the local area, but they were far from impressed with what the Marshall Liberal government is doing to them in the local area. It also caused some confusion because some people thought that I had something to do with these calls that woke people up last Wednesday morning. Then, just to prove that they were completely hopeless at running something, they allowed it to happen the next day. As some people said, these clowns could not run a circus.

The people of Aldinga are particularly upset with the Marshall government because they have been hit hard in so many different areas. There was $2 million in the midyear budget of 2017-18 for the local Aldinga soccer club to build pitches and put up lights. When the Marshall government came into power, they ripped that money out of the budget. It is an absolute disgrace to take that away from a sporting club that needs that development now, but the sporting precinct in Aldinga also needs this because, at the same time, the government is proposing to put an extra 900 to 1,000 houses all around the existing sporting complex.

They are also going to put in a school, which we announced in our 2017 budget, but they will have carriage of making sure that it works, which people are worried about. It is a school for about 1,650 students that will be right next door to the sporting complex. It goes without saying that when you are building an extra 1,000 houses at the back of one of the fastest growing communities in the state, and you are building a school for 1,650 people right next door to the sporting complex, they are going to need some help.

We have been working together with the sporting clubs this year and we teed up a meeting with the government. We had the mayor, Erin Thompson, as well as the CEO of the Onkaparinga council and many of the senior managers of the City of Onkaparinga turn up for this meeting. We were all sitting around the table with eight sporting clubs—footy, netball, croquet, lawn bowls, equestrian, dressage, soccer—but the government did not come to the table. That is pretty disrespectful to a group of volunteers who gave up their time to come to a meeting during the day.

People are involved in these clubs because they love the sport that they started with, whether it was hockey, netball or whatever. They joined up to do it, to give their time every weekend. They give their time during the week for training and they gave their time to come to a meeting. The government, which had ripped $2 million out of one of the sports down there, which would have been an anchor development for further development in that precinct, did not even bother to turn up.

This is the same government that almost 18 months after the election still has not given the people of Aldinga an electorate office for their local MP. I do not think that there are any MPs on either side of this house who would think that it is acceptable that 18 months after an election, when the Aldinga shopping centre has at least four free offices, that we have a leader in Premier Marshall who cannot oversee a government that can find an electorate office so that people can come in and get their forms signed by a JP, they can come in and get advice, or they can come in and just have a chat with their local MP.

We also have a development, the duplication of Main South Road, which we announced in our 2017 budget and which this government is doing a go-slow on. They still have not been out to consult with the people of Aldinga to ask them what they want. I want to thank the Main South Road Action Group for all the work they have done, but we are really scared that they are going to ignore the local pleas for underpasses and overpasses we were looking to have as part of that project. The people of Aldinga deserve better from the Marshall government. We hope to see a better performance over the next couple of years.