Friends of Parks Groups

S.E. ANDREWS (Gibson) (11:57): I move:

That this house—

(a) notes the significant impact Friends of Parks SA groups have had on the South Australian environment;

(b) expresses thanks to the over 5,000 member volunteers who protect and enhance South Australia’s flora and fauna; and

(c) notes the work of the Malinauskas Labor government to support biodiversity and the regeneration of parks.

Our environment is so precious, whether it is our national parks, our reserves, our street trees, our beaches or our own gardens. Biodiversity is the incredible tapestry of life on our planet, including different species of plants, animals and microorganisms, and the ecosystems they form. We need functioning biodiversity for clean air, healthy soil, modern medicine, food on our plates and a resilient earth that can respond to threats like climate change.

In South Australia, more than 1,100 of our plant and animal species are listed as threatened with extinction. The Malinauskas government made a commitment at the 2022 election to introduce the state's first Biodiversity Act, making sure conservation outcomes are fully integrated into how we all live sustainably for the long term. The first round of consultation has just finished, and the department is currently collating the feedback received to inform the drafting of the bill. Consultation on this draft bill will commence in the second half of the year, and I look forward to it coming before parliament.

This Labor government has established BioData SA, with an $8 million investment in the 2023-24 state budget. This sees the creation of a new biodiversity data system to transform how South Australia captures, manages and shares its biodiversity data with scientists, governments, businesses and the community. This will significantly improve the time lines and evidence base for environmental, social and economic decisions. Additionally, a $3 million biodiversity unit has been established within the Department for Environment and Water to focus on targeted species recovery, biodiversity monitoring, tackling pests and weeds and using science to protect nature. This unit has the creation of the Biodiversity Act as its priority.

Whilst our environment is pretty good at regenerating itself, it does need assistance to repair the damage of humans. And that is where the over 5,000 volunteers that are members and friends of parks groups come into their own, getting out into our parks, reserves and along our shores to protect and enhance our flora and fauna. I am lucky to have two of these dedicated groups in my community: the Friends of Minda Dunes in North Brighton and the Friends of Sturt River Landcare Group, who work along the Sturt River. Members of both groups join us in the gallery today, and I welcome them and thank them for their work and care for our environment and biodiversity.

The Friends of Minda Dunes was formed five years ago and has members mostly from the Brighton Dunes retirement community who commit their time every Tuesday morning to regenerate the dunes. The impact they have made during their first five years is transformative, from degraded dunes full of grass to dunes packed with thousands of native plants. I encourage members to check out their Facebook page. I always enjoy joining them for a morning of weeding and planting, to improve our environment.

Between 2019 and 2021, they introduced 17,000 new plants to the primary and secondary dunes. Each year, they have added thousands more seedlings to achieve their vision for the revegetation of the sand dunes and the re-establishment of the former coastal ecosystem. In addition to this work, in June last year they reclaimed a new area at the edge of the coastal park from a weedy lawn and planted it with 950 seedlings to create a habitat for the many butterflies that visit and inhabit the dunes. There is a particular butterfly which has disappeared from much of Adelaide's metropolitan coast.

The volunteers planted over 100 Adriana quadripartite—and Lindy will let me know if I have pronounced that correctly—or coastal bitter bushes to provide habitat for the bitter-bush blue butterfly. I am pleased to report that, after caterpillars of the bitter-bush blue butterfly were placed on the plants in January, the butterflies have been seen as well as a new generation of caterpillars, so breeding is successfully underway.

We also have another group with us: the award-winning Friends of Sturt River Landcare Group, who look after an entirely different environment in my electorate and are doing equally impressive work. This group took out the 2022 Green Adelaide Urban Landcare Award. Wariparri ('windy river') is the Kaurna name for the Sturt River, which runs from the Sturt Gorge Recreation Park to the Patawalonga Creek. The Friends of Sturt River Landcare Group have adopted six reserves adjacent to the river, and several more planting sites along the Sturt River Linear Park are planned.

Their long-term goal is to connect up biodiversity planting by the Sturt River Linear Park and drainage corridor wherever it is possible to do so. The group support work at the Oaklands Wetland, Kenton Avenue Reserve and Oaklands Reserve in my electorate, and have more recently revegetated three reserves in Glenelg North. As with the Minda Dunes Group, the transformative nature of the group's work is clear to see. I encourage members to check the photos on their website which show the significant change.

Beneath the canopy of the old red gums and other beautiful trees that line the Sturt River along the Sturt River Linear Park trail, the group have planted, and will continue On World Environment Day this year to plant, perennial tussock grasses, wispy sheoaks and other native grasses, wildflowers, salt bushes, herbs and butterfly attracting-plants, as they work to recreate a nature-filled native grassland and sheoak grove.

The group holds fortnightly working bees for two to three hours on a Sunday morning and winter weekday working bees for shift workers and retirees. They also have 'walk, talk and squawk' and 'out and about with birds' so that the community can learn more about the 80 bird species that inhabit the Oaklands Wetland. The group has established more than 90,000 seedlings in the past 10 years.

I would also like to acknowledge Samantha Kerr. Sam was runner up in the 2023 Westfield Local Hero Awards. Sam has united more than 1,200 people to maintain and re-establish native plant communities for biodiversity and climate resilience and received $5,000 for this work.

The state government supports the Friends of Parks groups through Landscape SA and the Department for Environment and Water. This financial year, 32 friends groups received grants of up to $5,000 through the SA National Parks and Wildlife Service's Friends of Parks—Small Grants Program to work on 41 projects across South Australia. This included the Friends of Minda Dunes, who received funding to increase the habitat and biodiversity of the Minda Dunes 2.

Regarding our parks, the Malinauskas government is committed to honouring the pivotal role Aboriginal people have played in managing our landscapes for thousands of years. We have made a $5 million commitment to employ 15 new Aboriginal rangers in our parks so that Aboriginal people and culture are at the forefront of our parks' network.

I encourage all members to join their locals Friends of Parks group, as I have done a few times now, and to hang around and share morning tea. I also encourage community members to watch the Facebook pages of these groups to see the fantastic work that these members do, and for anyone who can join in. We will improve our environment for future generations if we all do a small amount. That can ultimately change the world. I would like to thank you so much for coming in today and I really appreciate and value the work of our Friends of Parks. Thank you.

Mr BATTY (Bragg) (12:06): I move to amend the motion as follows:

That this house—

(a) notes the significant impact Friends of Parks SA groups have had on the South Australian environment;

(b) expresses thanks to the over 5,000 member volunteers who protect and enhance South Australia's flora and fauna; and

(c) congratulates the work of the Marshall Liberal government on their significant investment in South Australia's national parks and their practical commitments to support biodiversity and the regeneration of parks.

I think this is a very important motion and I thank the member for Gibson for bringing it to the house today because it is a really important opportunity for us as a parliament to acknowledge and celebrate the role of the volunteer in caring for our environment, something that is so often overlooked in this place. I want to join with the member for Gibson in welcoming the Friends of Parks groups who are joining us here in the chamber today.

I thank you so much for your contribution to your respective local communities. I commend the work you have done. I will definitely be checking out your Facebook pages and would love to come down and check out the work you have done in your own local communities, because the fact of the matter is that without thousands of volunteer hours from groups such as your own, so much work in enhancing our local communities and also in boosting and protecting biodiversity and protecting our environment more generally simply would not happen. So thank you for your work.

I want to use this as an opportunity to thank all those Friends of Parks groups right across the state, including several from my own area being the Friends of Ferguson Conservation Park in Stonyfell, the Friends of Mount Osmond Conservation Park and the Friends of Cleland National Park, which, of course, is one of our most recent national parks, being proclaimed two years ago as part of the previous Liberal government's record expansion of national parks that was underpinned by a record investment.

I want to take a moment just to talk about Cleland National Park because it takes up about half of my electorate and is a really important site for preserving bushland and the Adelaide Hills Face Zone with a lot of native wildlife. In fact, despite only being about a thousand hectares in size, Cleland is home to over 800 different species of flora and fauna and performs a very important environmental role and also, I think, a very important social role with the park attracting hundreds and thousands of visitors every year from right around the world who come to enjoy not only the amazing environment and biodiversity but also the walking trails, the cycling trails, attractions such as Waterfall Gully, Mount Lofty Summit, and Cleland Wildlife Park.

Indeed, just on the weekend, I did a wonderful walk around Chambers Gully and Woolshed Gully and enjoyed everything that that has to offer. I think there are about 600,000 people who enjoy the Waterfall Gully to Mount Lofty Summit walk each and every year. But, again, it would not be what it was without the volunteers and it would not be what it was without the role that the Friends of Cleland National Park play, who have been operating there for I think over 25 years now. They have done everything from restorative work to the natural landscape to monitoring the endangered southern brown bandicoot with infrared cameras and learning more about the rich biodiversity in this area.

It was a pleasure to join that group late last year on what turned out to be a very wet, rainy and windy day when we planted a number of trees around the Woolshed Gully Trail, which I did on the weekend. It was a pleasure to see some of them on their way already growing. They have spent many thousands of hours over 25 years now to enhance what I think is one of our greatest assets in the state, which is Cleland National Park.

They and the groups that are in the chamber today were the very happy beneficiaries of the previous Liberal government boosting Friends of Parks grants to $750,000 per annum, which supported these groups right across South Australia. I understand that the grant scheme was previously just $60,000 per annum, so it was a huge boost to our volunteer organisations that protect our environment. Of course, they were assisted by professional park rangers. We saw a 45 per cent increase in the number of park rangers employed by the National Parks and Wildlife Service, which conducts that really practical on-the-ground task of caring for our national parks.

It is lucky we saw this record investment during the previous Liberal government because it was accompanied with a record expansion of our national parks, including the establishment of Glenthorne National Park, which became Adelaide's second metropolitan national park after Belair; the establishment of the Hindmarsh Valley National Park; the purchase of Field River Valley to incorporate into Glenthorne; and, of course, increasing the protection of a number of conservation parks by turning them into national parks as well, from Deep Creek to Seal Bay to Cleland National Park in my own electorate.

It is a great opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate the work of the former Liberal government in this environment space as well as the work of the now Leader of the Opposition and then environment minister, who very deliberately set out to perform a record expansion of our national parks and very deliberately had money on the table to underpin that record expansion with a record funding boost from infrastructure in our parks to park rangers, and, importantly, with respect to this motion, to funding volunteer groups like the Friends of Parks.

I hope that this will continue because we want to continue to celebrate the work of the volunteers. Can I close by thanking the many thousands of volunteers who devote many thousands of hours to caring for our local environment, for protecting our parks and for enhancing our local community.