Coronavirus, Kangaroo Island

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL (Mawson) (15:21): What a different world we live in now from just a few short weeks ago with the advent of COVID-19 taking over the world stage. Today, I want to talk about some of the local effects that COVID-19 is having in my area and, I guess, the stress and the fear that people in the electorate of Mawson are telling me about. They have come up with some ideas, which they have expressed to me. In many cases, they have also expressed them to the government.

The people of Kangaroo Island are pretty much as one. The entire 4,500 member population of Kangaroo Island would like the island shut down. They keep being told, despite the council voting seven to one for the island to be shut down last week, that the State Coordinator, who is the police commissioner, says that there is no need to close down Kangaroo Island and that it should not be treated any differently from any other part of South Australia.

For pretty much all of its existence, Kangaroo Island has always been treated differently from other parts of South Australia because you can only get there in a ferry or on a plane, so it is quite easy to shut down the borders and it is quite easy to retain the purity of the island. That is why it is illegal to take a potato, bees, honey or lots of other prohibited items over to Kangaroo Island. It is one of the few places in Australia that is now free of feral goats and feral deer. It has never had foxes on the island, and for only a short time, until the goannas got them, it had rabbits there. So Kangaroo Island is a place you can lock down and keep things out of.

As the representative of the people of Kangaroo Island, I wanted to come into this place today and put it on the record that the people of Kangaroo Island are not happy with the government's response to their calls for the island to be shut down for all non-essential travel but to leave it open for freight to come onto the island, because of course people need to have goods and other services that are vital on the island.

If we move to the mainland side of the electorate of Mawson, the Fleurieu Peninsula, we have almost the perfect storm where we have one of the oldest and most vulnerable populations in Australia, yet we also have one of the highest visited places in South Australia. The people of Yankalilla, Normanville, Carrickalinga, Sellicks Hill, Sellicks Beach, Aldinga, McLaren Vale, Willunga, McLaren Flat, down to Cape Jervis, Rapid Bay and Second Valley, are very keen to keep tourists away during these school holidays and particularly over Easter.

They are very supportive of the Western Australian model, where the state has been divided up into regions and you have to have a good reason to go from the region that you live in to another region. That might be for medical appointments, it might be for work or it might be for some other approved reason. But here we keep being told, no, the State Coordinator, who is the police commissioner, says that is not necessary here, but we do not get any reasons why Kangaroo Island cannot be cut off.

We do not get any reasons why the state cannot be divided up into regions where people cannot go across borders, just as we cannot go to and from states at the moment because of border controls we have put in place to stop the spread of the coronavirus. We know that this virus cannot spread itself. The only way this virus gets around is by people moving it around. We saw that in northern Italy, when it was closed down, 12,000 families moved from northern Italy to their holiday homes in southern Italy. How do you think the virus got around Italy so quickly?

The UK had a sunny weekend a few weekends ago and everyone moved out of the big cities and into the countryside to get a little bit of respite. What they did was take the virus into regional areas of those countries without the facilities and without the health resources to look after the people who were then chronically ill. We want to avoid that in the electorate of Mawson, both on Kangaroo Island and on the mainland. We have seen some great responsibility from business owners who have stopped bookings. They have closed down their accommodation. They have closed down their bakeries.

Do you know what we do when we come in here, all 47 of us? We are meant to represent and we are meant to listen to the people in our area. That is what democracy is all about: of the people, for the people. The Premier and everyone in the cabinet have a very difficult job to do. I do not want to diminish their responsibility in any way. I think they have done a good job in many of the aspects that they are taking on in terms of health and the economy of South Australia, but I urge them to listen to the people of Mawson and what they would like to see happen in our area.