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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-03-16 Daily Xml
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Mawson Electorate

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL (Mawson) (15:47): This week marks 15 years since my election into this place back in 2006, along with the member for Light, the member for Hammond and the member for Unley. I want to rise today to thank the 25,000 people in the electorate of Mawson who have backed me in for four elections and to thank them for all the support that I have received from them and for all the good ideas that they have put to me. In some cases, they have been the people who have flagged issues that seem very small at times and then when you dig a little deeper they turn out to be big issues.

One of those issues is PFAS. In April last year, there was a little ad in the paper about a company wanting to dump PFAS from around Australia in the wonderful region of McLaren Vale. From that one contact, I was able to go out and talk to our community and garner some support and in October last year we had 348 people attend a public meeting at Tatachilla Lutheran College. Just two weeks ago, we finally convinced the EPA not to allow this deadly toxin to be dumped in our local area.

We have also had other wins over the 15 years and one of the biggest ones was when we stopped urban sprawl with a very important piece of legislation called the Character Preservation (McLaren Vale) Act. That came from a public meeting in 2009 in Aldinga called the Spring Forum. I went along with the very good news that I had spoken to the Minister for Infrastructure and the Minister for Planning and the proposal for the government to sell off land at Bowering Hill to be subdivided for housing was not going to go ahead. I had stopped it.

People at that meeting said, 'Well, that's all well and good while you are our local member or while we have Labor in government, but what happens after that?' It was clear that they wanted some legislation, so we worked over many, many months as a local community. We would go to cellar doors and put the butcher's paper up and work out what it was that we wanted to preserve that was so special in our local area. We had the environment groups, the grapegrowers, the winemakers, the tourism operators, the business associations, the residents' associations—everyone came together with one goal.

I then managed to get what we wanted through the Labor caucus. We then brought it in here and even without the support of the Liberal Party in either house still managed to get the numbers to get that very important legislation through. It is the best legislation of its type in Australia in terms of protecting what we have. That means that the town boundaries around McLaren Vale, McLaren Flat, Willunga, Aldinga, Sellicks Beach and Maslin Beach are locked in forever, or until both houses of parliament decide that it should be changed, and I think it would be a very foolish government that would try to do that.

We had other wins along the way over the past 15 years. One really important one was building the overpass at McLaren Vale. In terms of infrastructure spends, at $18 million it was not the most expensive thing that we have done in the south, but the McLaren Vale overpass was very important because three elderly ladies had lost their lives not long before, so again we had a campaign to push for road safety.

We duplicated the Liberal government's idiotic one-way expressway. That was just crazy. Visitors would come from all around the world to McLaren Vale and talk about the road that would close for an hour and a half with a boom gate so that it could change direction. It made sense to no-one, so we duplicated that.

We had the real threat of drilling for oil in the Great Australian Bight. That was one of those campaigns where I was so energised by the passion of the people that I represent, from the older people of Mawson to the schoolkids of Mawson. Students at Tatachilla Lutheran College and McLaren Vale Primary School wrote letters to the Norwegian Prime Minister, and I was able to take those across to Norway and really convince the government that it was a dumb idea to drill for oil in the Great Australian Bight. It was all risk and no reward: none of the oil was going to come to Australia and none of the jobs were going to come to South Australia (or at least to our part), but we had all the risk if something went wrong with the drilling for oil.

The biggest and most important thing that I have been involved in in the 15 years I have been in this place was the Kangaroo Island bushfires. I want to thank and make special mention of the people of the Kangaroo Island community for the way in which they battled those fires for four or fives weeks and have battled nonstop ever since to rebuild their lives. It is nothing short of an outstanding community.

Again, to all the 25,000 people in Mawson: you are my bosses. I come in here to do your bidding and to do your work. It is an absolute honour to do it and I hope to do it for at least another five years.

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