Flinders Island

S.E. ANDREWS (Gibson) (14:45): My question is to the Deputy Premier. Can the Deputy Premier update the house on action the government has taken to rehabilitate Flinders Island?

The SPEAKER: Minister for Transport, you are blocking the way there for the Deputy Premier. There's a bit of a traffic jam at the top there.

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Deputy Premier, Minister for Climate, Environment and Water, Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Minister for Workforce and Population Strategy) (14:45): Thank you very much for the question, and thank you for the call, Mr Speaker. I was doing my best to respond. Just to locate Flinders Island for people, it is the fourth biggest island in South Australia and it is about 30 kilometres off Elliston. Interestingly, it was named by Matthew Flinders allegedly after his younger brother, Samuel Flinders, although I am not sure how you could tell that it wasn't just named after the family, Flinders. Anyway, that's what he has claimed, and I am sure it's what he told his younger brother.

The island is privately owned. The Woolford family has owned it for a very long time and run primary production on there, and has long nursed an ambition to see it become much more back to the natural environment that existed before Europeans showed up. They are a terrific family, very dedicated.

It has, as one would expect, experienced what much of South Australia has experienced, and Australia has experienced, in the way that the environment has deteriorated. There are a number of feral species there and an absence now, a local extinction, of a number of marsupials. It's a replica on a small scale of what has happened in so much of South Australia, but just as it is an example of what has gone wrong in the past it is also poised to be a beacon of hope for how we can restore nature, and in combination with the federal government, with the family and with the state government, in part through the Landscape Board and in part through Parks and Wildlife, we are going to see the restoration of a very healthy environment right there.

Yesterday, I could have been accused—and often am accused—of being too generous and kind to people, on all sides of parliament, in saying when I was talking about the restoration of birdlife in the Mount Lofty Ranges that this is something that was a shared ambition. I suppose I often speak more in hope than in real expectation. This is another example where the previous government had reached out to the Morrison government and received a small amount of money to contribute to this, but it was woefully inadequate.

What is really important is not just that we think that there should be some work done and we think it would be a nice idea and the local family who owns it probably wants it, but we actually need a government that is prepared to act, that is prepared to invest. Not only has the South Australian government Landscape Board put up more money but, importantly, the Albanese government has almost tripled its commitment, in order to be able to properly see the transformation that we want to see.

What will that look like? To start with, it will be the eradication of pests—the cats, the rats and the mice that have infested that land—that the Woodford family have been asking for assistance with for some time. We are now going to be able to get on, now that we have adequate funding from the federal government to really go through a decent eradication program.

What will then follow is bringing back those marsupials: the wallabies that we want to see there and the bandicoots. It is important that they come back, because they are gorgeous animals that people get excited about. I don't know how many people have talked to me about phascogales since we talked about their restoration up north, people who had never heard about phascogales before but are excited by their coming back. But it's about more than that because, once you have those species there, you have the aeration of the soil, you are allowing the proper planting of vegetation and you are starting to see the restoration.

That may or may not interest people here, but it interests young people. We have somebody in the gallery today, young Summer Woods, who is a year 6 student who has come and asked me, 'What is parliament doing to make nature stronger, and what is the government doing to restore nature?' And this is what we are able to show as an example, through commitment, through funding and through having the right government in Canberra that is prepared to put its money alongside what it is interested in seeing.