Limestone Coast Country Cabinet

Mr McBRIDE (MacKillop) (15:12): It is my pleasure to be able to speak about the country cabinet going to the South-East and advocating for the Limestone Coast as a whole but particularly for MacKillop. We were fortunate enough to have the whole country cabinet, the ministers from the South Australian government, over there for two to three days.

When we started organising this, we started getting everything in place and the whole community started getting excited by this whole process: the visits, the consultation and the opportunity for my region to connect with the state government about all the things that we know can be done through state government, federal government or local government.

The announcements followed suit and are major. Obviously, the first one is the 27 mobile telephone towers for the whole of the Limestone Coast, $27 million worth. It is a collaborative approach by local government, state government and, yet to be committed in this process, the federal government, plus the telco Telstra. They are all working together to get these 27 towers covering 2,400 square kilometres and addressing some major blackspots—not all the blackspots but a majority of the blackspots for the Limestone Coast.

Since I have been in politics, which is now five years and going on to six years, we have seen some towers already rolled out in MacKillop, and we have obviously welcomed them. It has been one of those things that we have been working very hard on to try to find traction. It would have taken us another 10 to 20 years, at the speed that it was going, to address what we have just done over the last week, and what happened last week on Thursday with the rollout at the Millicent CFS.

We went on to Bordertown, and this was even more interesting and equally as important in relation to the housing shortage. It was by no mistake that we ended up in Bordertown in the Tatiara District Council. We had the state government there working with local government to solve the housing shortage which really is Australia-wide and regional South Australia-wide, but particularly in the Tatiara district.

We have evidence, and I heard it from the council—the last council that was in power and previous Mayor Graham Excell, and now we have new Mayor Liz Goossens—that the issue has been rolling along for at least 20 years in the Tatiara district, in relation to a shortage of housing, and nothing really has been achieved. What has been allocated thus far in Bordertown is $2.7 million on a 5.8 hectare site with 60 homes. The $2.7 million is to help and assist the council with confidence and with development.

In particular, five of these homes will be built by the South Australian government for government employees: that could be police, nurses, teachers or government employees in general. Again, this will take pressure off the private housing market and bring the government back into providing government housing which has not been done since the 1980s. That is going to be a bit of a gamechanger.

State governments here in South Australia across both political spectrums have ignored this since the eighties. We get to this crisis point where we say, 'We can't even employ people in our region anymore like teachers and doctors and nurses and firefighters and the like, that all belong to the government.' They have been out there in the housing market, perhaps adding to the stress of the lack of housing. Now we are seeing the government return to this area. Long may it work well and I hope the model for Bordertown will be able to be rolled out right across MacKillop, the Limestone Coast and the rest of regional South Australia as a model that works and addresses this issue.

We also saw the playground at Keith, the $1.1 million Don Moseley playground commonly known as the train park. The kids absolutely love the train. It is an old train from the Monash playground that was rebuilt in the park and the Premier had a ride on it the other day. The Premier allocated $250,000 to that $1.1 million build and the community was over the moon. They are nearly there with all the funding they require for that project.

Another rollout was for CFS firefighting capabilities: two more spotter helicopters and an overall announcement of an extra five winged aircraft to the state's firefighting capabilities, taking it from 26 to 31. That will be all the better to cover what we know can be tragic circumstances with the summer that is bearing upon us.

It was all well received. The community and MacKillop really did receive this country cabinet well and I think we had a good hearing with all the issues that we know MacKillop faces. Hopefully in the future we will see even more.