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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-05-04 Daily Xml
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South East Field Days

Mr McBRIDE (MacKillop) (15:17): I rise today to recognise and congratulate the organisers of the Lucindale South East Field Days, in particular the Lucindale Lions Club and their committee for their hugely successful event in 2023. The 43rd annual field days were held on Friday 17 and Saturday 18 March at Yakka Park in Lucindale.

For those of you in the house who do not know, Lucindale is a small rural town and district around 3½ hours south-east of Adelaide. It has a dynamic community which rallies together to help the Lucindale Lions Club run their field days. For an impressive 17 years the secretary was Lyn Crosby. This year she handed the reins to her daughter-in-law Nicole Crosby, who has done a fantastic job in overseeing this event.

Today, I am pleased to welcome both Lyn and Nicole to the house, along with other Lions Club members, Kevin Baker, John Motteram, Trevor (Smiley) Martin and Angus McTaggart. COVID caused the cancellation of the field days in 2020 and 2021. This was a huge blow not only for the town but for the region as a whole. They came back last year but numbers were down.

The South East Field Days were first held in 1978. Its purpose is to raise funds that can then be donated back to the local and wider communities of the Limestone Coast region. The field days started out with 70 exhibitors, and back in the late seventies drew a crowd of around 2,000 people. Fast forward to 2023: the crowd has grown tenfold. This year, 21,000 people walked through the gates, and 477 exhibitors signed up to have a site. The South East Field Days are now the largest annual field days in South Australia.

The South East Field Days are a fantastic networking event. They showcase new products and equipment and are a way for locals to compare and purchase all manner of machinery, whether it is seeders, tractors or sheep yards down to the humble spanner, hose reel or garden rake. A third of the crowd and exhibitors come from Victoria and many more come from other parts of the state such as the Barossa Valley, Burra and the Riverland.

The field days pump millions of dollars into the local economy. Exhibitors spend heavily on accommodation and food. Accommodation is booked out months in advance within a 100-kilometre radius. This means towns like Naracoorte, Penola, Kingston and Robe all benefit from this event.

As you can imagine, it takes a small army of people to make this event happen. This year, the organisers needed a workforce of around 350 volunteers. The field days committee then pays the charities or local sporting bodies who provide these volunteers, resulting in them receiving valuable income. In 2023, 24 different charities or sporting groups benefited from the event to the tune of $15½ thousand. Other charities earn money through catering for the thousands of people who attend.

This year, the Lucindale Lions Club raised an impressive $100,000 through its gate and site fees. This money is used to generously support charities such as cancer research and fund local community projects, scholarships and school excursions. To date, the Lucindale Lions have given more than $2 million to local, national and international charities. Donations have gone to a wide range of projects such as a CT scanner for the Naracoorte hospital and the community pool in Lucindale.

Thank you to Lucindale Lions Club and the Lucindale field days committee for all the work you did in making this event so successful. Thank you to the community, the volunteers, the exhibitors and everyone who put their hands up to help. Thank you to everyone who walked through the gates and helped make this a field days event to remember. I urge anyone who has not been before to take a drive to our wonderful South-East and head to the 2024 Lucindale South East Field Days. I know it will be another hugely successful event.

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