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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-05-02 Daily Xml
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PICTURE PLAYFORD 2043

Mr ODENWALDER (Little Para) (15:22): I rise today to say a few things about an initiative of my local council, the City of Playford, which—

Mr Goldsworthy: Good mayor.

Mr ODENWALDER: Yes. The member for Kavel says it has a very good mayor. It is not very often I stand up and say anything good about the City of Playford, but today I want to praise it on a very good initiative. It is called Picture Playford 2043, and it is essentially an informal public consultation exercise with the aim of getting residents' input into where they want the City of Playford to be in 30 years' time.

It asks people to picture the kind of city they would like to be living in in 30 years' time (it runs parallel to the state plan), and some of the challenges and opportunities they see in achieving this aim. Importantly I note that it is using new social media as part of its campaign, as well as more traditional forms of public consultation like postcards and conversation corners in public places.

Last week I met with the coordinator of this program, Rachel Siddall, and outlined to her my own history in the City of Playford and some of my views about where the city should be heading. I welcomed the opportunity, having a bit of a layman's interest in urban planning. I welcomed it; obviously I am always interested in improving my local area. I told her about my experiences growing up in Elizabeth Downs, and I was candid about what I saw as both the positive and negative aspects of growing up in what is essentially a satellite city, which was then called Elizabeth.

As I have said before in this chamber, Elizabeth was and is a unique place. When I was growing up it was very much a reflection of the largely UK born or UK descended population. It was also a planned city, based around a large manufacturing plant and some related industry. The central theme behind the original housing plan seemed to be individual and distinct cells of housing all centred on a primary school and a small shopping centre, and at the centre of the city was the aptly named Elizabeth Town Centre.

Over the years we have seen the town centre grow from an open-air pedestrian mall with a fair amount of green space—and notably Windsor Square to the north-east, which once hosted a visit from The Queen, who the city is named after—into a large enclosed shopping centre, surrounded by a sea of car parking and encircled by a ring of busy main roads. These car parks and roads make the centre an island, physically separated from the residents and surrounding transport, sporting, business and education services.

While I like the Elizabeth centre and I have spent probably more than my fair share of time there over the years, I made it clear that any vision of Elizabeth for the next 30 years should include moves to make the whole of the CBD of Elizabeth more pedestrian friendly and more joined up, with more mixed use development and far easier access of movement between the shopping areas and the sports, transport and other areas. I think this is essential for many reasons, and I will not go into them here.

Today, I simply want to congratulate the City of Playford on making an effort to hear what its residents want. The Picture Playford 2043 project will feed into the Playford Community Plan, which is currently under review. As I said, the old City of Elizabeth was a largely working class, UK-descended city. The City of Playford today, however, following Elizabeth's amalgamation with Munno Para, is a much more diverse community in terms of its population and industry. The Playford website is instructive in illustrating this.

The City of Playford had the fastest population growth rate in the state last year and is now home to about 80,000 people. It is expected that in 2043 this figure will be about 193,000. Twenty-eight per cent of these people are under the age of 17; only 16 per cent of this community is over 60 years old (obviously, this figure will change dramatically with the ageing population over the next 30 years); and 12 per cent of them live in the rural areas of Virginia, One Tree Hill and Angle Vale, which I do not believe were in the old City of Elizabeth.

The demographic mix has certainly changed since I was a kid. Just last year, people from 29 different countries took out citizenship in Playford and 268 overseas immigrants settled in Playford, with 51 per cent from Asia and 29 per cent from Africa. Further, 2.6 six per cent of the population is Indigenous.

Getting back to the Picture Playford 2043 plan, some of the submissions have been instructive, and I want to quote a few here. Individuals have said that they picture:

A place of community with people connecting in their local area yet relating to the larger community too.

A place with no graffiti, a place for my grandchildren to play without fear.

Playford as a second CBD offering almost all the services of Adelaide. Vibrant, busy, socially attractive.

A place where teenagers feel pride in the area of Playford and can't wait to Twitter or tell their friends about how much there is to do here.

I think this last comment is perhaps the most instructive, because I also want young people to feel pride in their local area. I want them to be proud enough to stay in larger numbers once they have become educated, skilled or qualified because we need to retain a skilled and educated workforce in the north so that local people can truly share in the state's economic success in the future.

I want to congratulate Rachel and everyone else involved in the project. I also want to recognise those locals who have lent their names to the campaign, in particular, Sheila Hall, who is a local Rotarian, and Beau Brug, who is a young man involved in seemingly everything in the north and is an excellent example of the kind of community-minded young person we need to encourage and keep in the north.

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