Light Electorate

The Hon. A. PICCOLO (Light) (15:56): Today, I would like to talk about the Light Electorate Community Recovery Committee, which I helped facilitate back in May 2020. The purpose of setting up this committee was to bring a whole range of people together and to set out a plan for economic and social recovery, or strategy, and to act as an advocate to governments at all levels.

The Light Electorate Community Recovery Committee comprised membership leaders from local government, business, education, health and community organisations all around the one table. I would like to take this opportunity to thank those members who have sat on that committee from time to time. I will quickly go through them just so members of this house can get an understanding of the breadth and depth of that committee.

There was Dr Naomi Rutten, a general practitioner who specialises in mental health; Ethan White, a year 12 student from Xavier College and also very active in the community; Caren Brougham, the Executive Officer of the Gawler Business Development Group; Katherine Krolling, the DES Employment Consultant at Job Prospects Gawler; Major Darren Cox from the Salvation Army; Barry Neylon, President of the Gawler Broadcasting Association; Liz Heavey from the Light Regional Council, who is involved in tourism development; Lorinda Bayley, a community development officer also from the Light Regional Council; and Danny Deptula, Principal of St Patrick's Technical College.

There was also Andrew Culley, a managing partner at Deloitte Private, who provided good economic analysis and insights; Greg Pattison, the Executive Strategic Adviser from the City of Playford; David Barrett, Manager Business Enterprises and Communications at the Town of Gawler; Darryl Matthews, a member of the Rotary Club of Gawler Light; Matt Clemow, Deputy Chair of the Committee for Adelaide; Angie Michaels, Principal from Gawler and District College; Michael Holmes, Principal of Trinity College Senior; Leah Blankendaal, who is with RDA Barossa specialising in the creative arts; and Simon Carpenter, Vice President of the Barossa Light & Gawler Football Association.

As you can see, the idea was to bring together a whole range of people to see what we could do as a community to help the community of Gawler to recover from the pandemic and also the changing circumstances in our local economy and community as a result of the pandemic. I would now like to bring to the house's attention some of the matters we discussed and some of the resourcing issues and constraints this committee identified that need to be addressed.

In terms of education and training, the committee noted that the teachers, who are normally really hardworking, had even more work to do during the pandemic trying to teach young people, online in many cases, but there were also cases when they had to have students both in school and at home. Certainly, the teachers have had a hard time and will require some ongoing support and professional development to assist them.

In terms of local small businesses and some of the issues that were raised, one thing the pandemic accelerated to some extent was online sales. Certainly, online sales increased during that time, and small business people are telling us that they now need to better understand how they can make their own small business more digitally friendly—in other words, sales that are not only face to face but also online. There is an important role for government and other organisations to provide those small businesses with the training and support to help their businesses evolve into the online marketing area.

In terms of health, sadly the pandemic showed the utter chaos in our health system, particularly when it comes to ambulance ramping. That was mentioned on a number of occasions. Dr Naomi Rutten also identified that the mental health issues that have arisen from this pandemic will have a long tail and that we need to be ready to make sure we have the necessary professionals to undertake that work.

In agriculture, food and wine, we need to work out how we can better sell and market our green products. In terms of other infrastructure, there is obviously the need for the duplication of Curtis Road. That came high on the list of infrastructure for our community and, in terms of the Gawler River and the Northern Floodway, works need to be done to protect our Virginia market gardeners. This pandemic has shown that we also need to support our volunteers so they can support our community.