Scott Creek Conservation Park

Ms THOMPSON (Davenport) (14:20): My question is to the Deputy Premier. Can the Deputy Premier please inform the house about work being undertaken at the Scott Creek Conservation Park?

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Deputy Premier, Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Minister for Climate, Environment and Water, Minister for Workforce and Population Strategy) (14:20): Thank you to the member for her question. Scott Creek, as many people would know, is a beautiful part of the Adelaide Hills. It is a biodiversity hotspot. In fact, it is one of the largest contiguous areas of native vegetation in the region. It's home to a number of threatened species, including the endangered southern brown bandicoot, and it has some 130 species of birds, many of which are endangered or are on the way to becoming endangered.

Many people will be aware that, over the last 25 years, there has been a serious decline in bird abundance and an increase in the vulnerability of species throughout the Adelaide Hills; the Adelaide Hills themselves being of Australian significance in being a biodiversity hotspot.

I went there just last week to visit both the Friends and Birds SA, who were doing some banding. One of the features of Scott Creek is that it was devastated by the Cherry Gardens bushfire, a fire that was started by an arsonist, a deliberate choice to set fire to a bit of scrub that turned into an absolute catastrophe, not least for Scott Creek which lost about two thirds of its space.

What that has meant is that the Friends have been spending time, effort and also money from government to work on revegetation and managing weeds as plants have come back. We have had some beautiful weather, but what happens when you have beautiful weather is everything starts growing and if you allow the weeds to get out of control they don't permit our native species to really take hold.

They have done an outstanding job. In fact, when we had morning tea some of the Friends came up and they hadn't managed to find a weed in their hunt for weeds. That's an extraordinarily impressive effort. It would not have happened if we didn't have a Friends group. It reminded me of the importance of the election commitment that we made coming in to give $3 million worth of grants to Friends groups across South Australia, because a dollar spent by a volunteer organisation is repaid many times.

As I said, I was also there with Birds SA. Birds SA do banding in order to determine what's been happening to species over time. As I have made mention before, I grew up with a father who is a bit of a mad birdo and so, therefore, I have been involved in banding expeditions before. On this occasion, when I arrived they had just caught a pair of white-browed scrubwrens, male and female, that had been caught together the previous time they had gone looking a few years ago. So a kind of cute, romantic story of a couple of birds that really like hanging out with each other. Of course, having taken all the details we then released them together.

While that is a sweet story, it should not belie the importance of this kind of scientific work. It may not sound earthshaking, it may not sound like this is the highest priority for what people should put their volunteering hours into, yet we know that we are in the midst of an extinction crisis that will affect our children and their children. We know that if we don't do something about restoring and protecting nature we will all pay for that, both in the health of our natural environment and also in our capacity to have primary production, which is dependent on the ecosystem services provided by biodiversity. It's why these conservation parks are so important. It's why the volunteers, both at Birds SA and in the Friends groups, are so important.

In closing, I would like to pay tribute to the people working in the National Parks and Wildlife Service who work alongside those volunteers and do an extraordinary job with, as I would imagine we would all accept, almost not enough resources to do all the stuff that we ask of them to do. They keep expanding what they are capable of and I want to pay tribute to the work that they do.