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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-05-17 Daily Xml
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Adelaide Parklands

The Hon. D.G. PISONI (Unley) (15:13): Today, I rise to speak about an issue that is of great concern to people who live in the north-west of my electorate in particular, and that is the loss of public access at Park 21 in the Parklands. It is very important for those who live in Unley because geographically Unley is the smallest of the state electorates. It is small because it has very little open space and a higher density of living, which means we need more public open space. The South Parklands have been part of the life of people who live in the northern part of my electorate for the entire time I have been representing them and a long time before that.

We know that the government has proposed that nearly one-quarter—25 per cent—of a patch of Parklands between Greenhill Road, South Terrace, Sir Lewis Cohen Avenue and Goodwood Road/West Terrace will be fenced off to make provision for the South Australia Police Mounted Unit, in other words, our police horses that we see in the streets.

Forty horses, perimeter fencing—it was interesting when I heard the Premier in answer to a question from the member for Bragg today about public access. The question was: will there be public access to Park 21? The Premier suggested that there could be some limited public access and then went on to talk about how children could see horses at the existing site, but stopped short of horse rides being available for children at the new site. The facts are, this is going to be a fenced facility. It has been described by a government spokesperson in the media as being 'a safe place'. Of course it is going to be safe; no-one will be able to access it. It will be fenced off, and this is the major concern that constituents in Unley have about this development.

Many of my constituents have been spending decades bringing back natural flora and fauna into that area. If you have ever had the chance to walk through there, you could be excused for thinking that you were back in nature, miles from the city of Adelaide. The tops of high-rise buildings that you can see over the trees are a bit of a giveaway that Adelaide is not very far away but that is not the point.

The point is that it is an area of Parklands that is used, and just because it is not used for sport and not used for formal recreation, it does not mean that you can say it is an unused piece of Parklands that is up for grabs for a government facility. It is used by those who have been restoring that sector, by people who walk through the area, and the people who breathe the very air, the oxygen that is produced by those trees.

We know in the inner suburbs in particular that tree canopy is becoming more and more valuable as we are seeing less and less of it. In the City of Unley we are losing about two Unley ovals a year of tree canopy. While we are talking about Unley Oval, so that the parliament can have a vision as to the area that will be fenced off under this proposal by the Malinauskas government, it is the equivalent of four Unley ovals, an extraordinary amount of space that will be locked away for exclusive government use in an area that now people have access to 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and an area where many people have been volunteering and giving something back to the community by restoring the native flora and fauna back to what was perceived to have been there prior to European settlement.

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