Net Interstate Migration

Mr COWDREY (Colton) (15:19): I rise today to speak about something that I think is imperative to the future of South Australia. In fact, it is actually one of the reasons that I got involved in politics and ran for state parliament, and that is our direction in South Australia for our young people and what has colloquially been known as the 'brain drain' from South Australia.

As a young professional in my 20s in the early 2000s when Jay Weatherill was Premier, we saw 4,500 to 5,000 people effectively flowing out of South Australia each and every year—our best, our brightest, leaving South Australia to go and pursue what they believed to be careers elsewhere. In fact, it even peaked in 2015-16 at nearly 8,000 people leaving the state.

One of the things that we are most proud of on this side of the chamber is our record when it came to turning that around, to have invested in a range of industries where people finally saw an opportunity and a chance. I clearly was not going to go into a profession that involved my hands. I had limited choice compared to others in terms of where I was going to go in terms of a professional career, but I worked with so many people who saw leaving South Australia as the only way to progress their careers.

On this side of the house, we did something about it. We decided to invest in new sectors, to develop new sectors, to see the prospect that the cyber industry, the defence industry and AI could have for South Australia. Lot Fourteen, just down the road here on North Terrace, was one of the fundamental reasons that many young people have described as their change in tack, where we shifted the influence of those STEM subjects in the high school years, shifted where some young people were doing their tertiary studies into vocations that involved engineering and otherwise that were around some of those key sectors and growth sectors for the future, not just here in South Australia but more broadly across the world.

What did we see? In 2018-19, in the first year of the Marshall Liberal government, there was a significant decrease in net interstate migration, jumping from what had been the average over the last 10 or so years, reducing that to just over 3,000 who left the state. In the next year, 2019-20, just over 1,200 people left the state. There has been an assertion from the Deputy Premier today that her federal Labor government colleagues have just simply modelled the trajectory that the state was heading in prior to COVID. That is just simply a nonsense. If you look at the numbers, they speak for themselves. If you look at the facts and the history, they speak for themselves.

We did not have a lockdown in South Australia until November of 2020. People were able to make decisions for themselves and go about their daily lives largely unimpacted or unimpeded up until that point. There was a significant shift in the trajectory of net interstate migration and our young people choosing to stay here under the Marshall Liberal government, and that was the result of those direct investments into those sectors. What have we seen since? Unfortunately, there has been focus on a number of things, but certainly those industries have not seen the same enthusiasm by any stretch of the imagination.

Why is net interstate migration so important? Why is population growth in South Australia so important? It is not just the fact that we need to stand on our own two feet, it is not just that we should, at a bare minimum, demand that we want to reach a point where we take no more than we give in terms of our contribution through GST, but it also matters when it comes to representation in federal parliament.

For too long, South Australia has been going backwards, and it is on days like today, having seen the results of the federal budget handed down, that we see the stark reality of why net interstate migration makes sense. We have seen a federal Labor government that has simply turned away from South Australia because of the political implications not being there for this state. Despite our Premier running around pretending that he has kudos in the national arena, the delivery has been minuscule—minuscule for a range of reasons, but you only need to look at the confidence the federal Labor government have themselves that the plug has been pulled again and the brain drain is back on in South Australia under Premier Peter Malinauskas.