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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-12-02 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

LIBERAL PARTY INITIATIVES

Mrs REDMOND (Heysen—Leader of the Opposition) (15:17): I saw the most wonderful quote in the paper this week from the Minister for Transport. He said:

A bad government sitting every day of the week is still going to be a bad government.

How right he is! This is a bad government. It is a bad government lacking any vision for this state and it is a government that is tired, arrogant and out of ideas. This government has got so many internal problems at present that its only concentration is what it can say next to try to win an election on 20 March.

It has followed us already and played follow the leader on desalination. I thank the former leader, the member for Davenport, for having a vision for South Australia and recognising that in this state it would be sensible to have a desalination plant to protect us against a failure of rainfall. I thank the member for Davenport.

The Hon. M.J. Atkinson: Why did you bring him down?

Mrs REDMOND: I did no such thing.

The Hon. P.L. White: You voted against him!

Mrs REDMOND: No, I did not: check your facts. Then we had great ideas about stormwater. Today the minister almost got into the 21st century by recognising that stormwater capture and re-use will be the way of the future. This government has been in denial about it for a long time. Finally, they have got to the point of deciding to follow us on that, as well, except they will not yet recycle and re-use stormwater.

They are still thinking that we have to capture it and reuse it but not make it into something that can be put into the reservoirs. As we on this side of the house know, water in reservoirs is actually stormwater. Where do you think it came from? How does it get into rivers? How did it get anywhere? It fell; it's stormwater. So, this government has followed on that. Most recently, of course, we were urging them for some time to give us some easing of water restrictions. They kept saying, 'No, we can't ease the water restrictions' but suddenly, finally, they played follow the leader again and we had the easing of water restrictions.

Then we get onto Tasers. This government remained for some reason implacably opposed to the use of Tasers by our police force but suddenly, in the past couple of weeks, they have decided they can follow us on that yet again. Actually, we could save a lot of time if you guys just moved over here and let us have the ideas in the first place.

As to the Magill Training Centre, we have argued long and hard that there needed to be a change, that the Magill Training Centre had to be removed. The juvenile justice select committee reported on that over five years ago. One of its recommendations was that it needed to be replaced urgently. The government ignored it until we, with the benefit of public pressure on the issue, were able to persuade them that that was something we needed to do, and now today we have the government trying to get out of the position it has found itself in because we had the vision to announce a new direction for Adelaide.

We have explained why our hospital is better left where it is, and there are very good reasons for leaving that hospital where it is. We have some exciting ideas about the future of this state and this city and how to make those old rail yards into something for all South Australians to be proud of. We have a vision, and we know that the Adelaidenow website was running at something like 83 per cent our way, and that is the only reason this government has come out with this half-baked cobbled together idea that they have now suddenly got an answer to all the problems.

Their historic agreement is nothing more than a memorandum of understanding which is not going to be any sort of agreement until July next year by which time we, on this side, will be sitting on that side, and we will have a much better vision for the future of this state.

The Hon. M.J. Atkinson interjecting:

Mrs REDMOND: It is a half-baked idea. It fails to address a lot of the fundamental issues such as car parking. A couple of days ago the Treasurer was out there trying to pick a fight over the number of car parks in our proposed vision and here he is proposing this 50,000 seat stadium. How are people going to get there? They are going to park here with no increase in parking here, walk across a new bridge in the winter or park on the Parklands. Do you think the Parklands people are going to like that? There will be no roof for the stadium.

Time expired.

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