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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2018-07-03 Daily Xml
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Glenthorne National Park

Mr MURRAY (Davenport) (15:04): My question is to the Minister for Environment and Water. Will the minister update the house on what the recent signing of a memorandum of understanding with the University of Adelaide means for the government's commitment to create a new national park in the southern suburbs of Adelaide?

The Hon. D.J. SPEIRS (Black—Minister for Environment and Water) (15:04): I thank the member for Davenport for his question, and I know that the new national park that the Liberal government is looking to create in the southern suburbs will have a fantastic benefit for many of his constituents.

It gives me great pleasure to be able to update this house that a couple of weeks ago, just at the end of the last sitting week, this government signed a memorandum of understanding with the University of Adelaide in relation to taking the first steps towards transferring the land which forms Glenthorne Farm at O'Halloran Hill—to see that transferred to the state government in order to create the foundational point of what will become Glenthorne National Park, around 1,500 hectares of open space in the southern suburbs of Adelaide, with Glenthorne Farm as the focal point for that new national park.

This now paves the way for negotiations around the transfer of that land and keeping intact a partnership with the University of Adelaide. We know that the university have had a somewhat difficult history over the years with that site and the stewardship of that site, but it is important that the University of Adelaide have an opportunity to stay involved with that site on an ongoing basis, because they have shown a significant amount of goodwill to the government and to the community of the southern suburbs in coming into partnership with the state government for the creation of the new national park.

So it is great to be able to update the house that the University of Adelaide will now be involved in a very significant research partnership with the state government. That research partnership will look specifically at how you develop a new urban national park from scratch. That is the great thing about Glenthorne national park: it is the creation of a new national park within the metropolitan environment. That is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It is not something that happens on a regular basis by any means, not only in South Australia but anywhere in Australia and even at an international level.

We want to partner with the University of Adelaide to talk with them about what that might look like, to get them to undertake research around how this national park will be developed and in particular to get them to look at the revegetation side of this national park. We know that there is the opportunity—as well as having recreational opportunities along Majors Road, which is a recreational precinct within the park already—and the scope to do a very large-scale revegetation project, the creation of an urban forest. Sometimes this project has been described as the lungs of the south.

We want the University of Adelaide to actually undertake the research as to what that would look like: what trees, what shrubs, what grasses would you plant and where would they be planted? How would things like bushfire prevention be factored into the development of this park from the outset? What would be the balance between open space, in terms of grasslands, versus more heavily wooded areas? So the University of Adelaide is going to be heavily involved in this.

I hope that they are able to build on the longstanding work of David Paton, who has a long association with that site and has a passion for seeing grey box woodland established across the Mount Lofty Ranges. That vision was an earlier vision of the University of Adelaide for this site, and there is now an opportunity for the state government, in partnership with the university and of course in partnership with the wider community of the southern suburbs, to develop this new national park for our city.

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