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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2018-11-13 Daily Xml
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International Driverless Vehicle Summit

Mr DULUK (Waite) (15:00): My question is to the Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Local Government. Can the minister inform the house about the ADVI summit, which was recently held in Adelaide?

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL (Schubert—Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Local Government, Minister for Planning) (15:00): I would like to thank the member for Waite for his question and note that autonomous vehicles could help his driving ability immensely. I look forward to that being the case in the future.

Just a couple of weeks ago, we had the third ADVI conference here in South Australia, essentially a conference to help advance the use of autonomous and connected vehicles. It was a great opportunity to understand where this technology is at in terms of its stage of development and where we need to look to in terms of going to the future.

It was exciting to be able to talk to a lot of the proponents who have received money under the Future Mobility Lab funding. It is something that I think is a great initiative and a bipartisan initiative, one that we can help to really bring and advance this technology from an industry standpoint, in terms of helping to bring people into South Australia and generate jobs as a result of this industry and our ability to really get involved in the supply chain for this technology. The other side of it is how we can actually integrate this brilliant idea as part of our public transport and private transport future.

It was a great opportunity to collect together all the businesses that have an involvement in South Australia—and there are some fantastic local businesses, like SAGE Automation and Cohda Wireless—and also a great opportunity to have EasyMile base its Asia Pacific headquarters here in South Australia and the opportunity to work with local people to help deliver that. What is also exciting is that these people are working on a global scale and they are here in Adelaide. I think that the opportunity to have started ahead of the game in this area is something where we can't sit back and rest on our laurels because this is a very fast-moving pace.

The real question that I put to the conference and in some of the discussions I had in, around, during and after the conference was about what is next. Everybody around the world and everybody around the country is doing trials into autonomous vehicles—and they are great to help bring the consumer along and the community along in that this is something that can happen now as opposed to being something that is in some sort of future tense.

But the real opportunity is: how do we stay ahead of the game and what do we need to do as the South Australian government to facilitate that? We were the first in the country to have legislation around allowing trials on public roads—again, a bipartisan initiative of this parliament. I think the next step for us is how we take something from a trial basis and how we can make it work in reality.

That was where these companies were at, essentially saying, 'We need a government that's got the courage and the ability to find some commercial use cases,' so that instead of running trials—which are good in and of their own right, and we need to go down this path and bring the community along with us—how do we actually—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL: —take that next step and embed this as part of our future? That is something that the department is going to be working on, especially as the Future Mobility Lab funding rolls through into the middle of next year. What do we need to do to take the next steps for those companies that have shown faith in South Australia to settle here, to advance here and to use Adelaide and South Australia as their headquarters? What is next? What can we do as a government to make sure that we are ahead of the game?

We do have some natural advantages. Colonel William Light has a lot to be thanked for in this regard because the layout of our city is fantastically set up to be able to handle autonomous vehicle trials.

The Hon. D.C. van Holst Pellekaan: He was a visionary. He was ahead of his time.

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL: As he looks down on us from the hill, he is saying, 'This was my plan all along.' We do need to bring the community on a journey with us here. We need to help them be comfortable with this technology so that we can make sure that the next steps we take in this journey are ones where we actually provide commercial applications for South Australians.

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