Visitors

The SPEAKER: We have some guests with us in parliament today for question time. During the lunch break, the Minister for Education and I were very pleased to be at the Muriel Matters Awards, where awards were given to students from year 7 to year 12 from right around South Australia—and it is pleasing to see about 29 per cent of the students were from regional South Australia, including Madeline, who is over here from Kangaroo Island; it is great to see you. To hear the stories of the great work that these students are doing in their local community to advance democracy and to advance strength in community is truly inspiring.

We are very fortunate to be able to look at the next generation and know, for those of us who are ageing, that we are going to be in very safe hands with the types of emerging leaders that we have got coming through. Thank you for your presentations. Congratulations on your awards. I would again like to thank the Minister for Education; our education team here, led so well by Natalie Badcock; and all the people from the independent school sector, Catholic school sector and the government education area for making this happen.

We have Frances Bedford here. Anyone who was in this place while Frances was the member for Florey will know how passionately she advocated to promote the work of Muriel Matters and to get these awards up and running. I also want to acknowledge the member for Morialta, who was the education minister at the time when these awards were instigated, and I reckon the deputy leader was the Speaker when these awards were instigated. They are a tremendous thing for us to do as a parliament to show that recognition, but also for students across South Australia to learn about the pioneering work that Muriel Matters did and to remind people that you can do really important work and change the world from outside of parliament. Congratulations to everyone involved.

We have some students here from Christian Brothers College, and they are guests of the member for Playford and the member for Adelaide. Welcome along to question time. Good to see you all. A lot of waving going on up there, very excited.

We have James Osborne Jackson, who is a guest from the United Kingdom, and he is a guest of the member for Elizabeth. So welcome to you, to parliament as well.