OzAsia Festival

The Hon. J.S. LEE (15:44): It is my great honour today to speak about the OzAsia Festival and the inaugural Chinatown Adelaide dragon boat competition, supported by DragonBoat SA as part of the exciting OzAsia 2018 program. This year, the OzAsia Festival is celebrating 12 years of achievement and is proudly recognised as Australia's leading international arts festival with a meaningful engagement with Asia. It is essential to a multicultural community of modern Australians.

A special thank you to Douglas Gautier, CEO of Adelaide Festival Centre, and Joseph Mitchell, Artistic Director of OzAsia, for their vision and leadership in hosting the country's pre-eminent international festival. The Premier, with responsibility for arts and multicultural affairs, expressed the state government's support in his remarks in the OzAsia program booklet, in which he offered his heartfelt congratulations to the Adelaide Festival Centre and members of the South Australian community for embracing OzAsia. As Assistant Minister to the Premier, I had the great honour to represent the Premier of South Australia, the Hon. Steven Marshall, to open this year's OzAsia Festival. I also had the privilege of opening the OzAsia film festival this year.

The OzAsia Festival kept me really busy, and I loved it. On 27 October, I had the great pleasure of joining His Excellency the Governor, the Hon. Hieu Van Le, to officiate the opening of OzAsia's inaugural dragon boat competition. In Chinese culture, the courageous dragon rides the clouds in the sky and commands the wind, mist and rain. It is a revered symbol of strength and power. Hence, the Governor, minister David Pisoni and I, together with other VIP guests, had the honour to participate in the auspicious eye-dotting ceremony to awake the dragons for each dragon boat so that the race could be fierce, fast and furious.

While the Dragon Boat Festival is traditionally celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese lunar calendar, this is the first year, the first time, a dragon boat race has been held to coincide with the spectacular OzAsia moon lantern parade, which took place on 27 October 2018. I would like to congratulate the strong partnership and exceptional teamwork shown by Chinatown Adelaide and DragonBoat SA, with the support of OzAsia. It is hard to believe the joint organisers had only two months to put the event together. They worked tirelessly to stage a successful and spectacular event on the River Torrens.

Special thanks to George Chin, president of Chinatown Adelaide, together with his two vice-presidents, Dato Herman Chin and Eric Lai, for their tenacious efforts to come up with the initial concept and then work collaboratively with the chair and team of DragonBoat SA to organise 20 races, involving 25 participating teams. It was amazing to see a total number of participants of 350 people, ranging from the age of 17 to 70 years old, from diverse backgrounds getting involved in the dragon boat race.

Honourable members may be interested to know that some of the participants were dragon-boating for the first time in their lives, and they informed me that they enjoyed every minute of it because to them it was not a competition. It was about having a go and working as a team to forge new friendships with each other. Dragon boat racing is amongst the fastest growing team water sports in the world. The dragon boat race presented the opportunity for participants to embrace an ancient Chinese culture within a carnival setting like OzAsia that recognises sporting achievements.

I was honoured to present the trophies to winning teams at the closing ceremony and congratulate all of them for their mighty efforts. I was a dragon-boater when I was a teenager and know for a fact that to achieve optimum performance a dragon boat team must work consistently in harmony and at the same time demonstrate strength and endurance. I once again would like to congratulate all those involved in the dragon boat competition and OzAsia Festival. Congratulations to everyone.