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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-06-27 Daily Xml
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Appropriation Bill 2023

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading (resumed on motion).

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL (Mawson) (12:41): I rise to support this bill and to congratulate the government on the budget in which the electorate of Mawson once again prospered by the delivery of funds to all sorts of projects and services across the almost 6,000 square kilometres of the seat that I proudly represent in this place.

Last week, I had the pleasure of hosting the entire cabinet on Kangaroo Island, as the Premier and all the ministers came over to listen and to meet with and to go on site visits with people, businesses, sporting organisations and other groups on Kangaroo Island to see firsthand how things go on the island. I must say that the response from the people of Kangaroo Island was overwhelmingly warm and welcoming. The forum on the Thursday night was terrific in terms of people getting up and thanking the government for various things we have done for them in our short time back in government.

We also heard a heart-wrenching story of a mum whose three-year-old child was misdiagnosed on the island and had to come to the Women's and Children's Hospital where they spent the best part of 23 days in a very bad way. You could feel the compassion from members of cabinet and also everyone in that room as our hearts went out to that woman.

Thankfully, the three year old made a recovery, but it is one those important stories you do not necessarily hear unless you go out and, in a way, expose the cabinet to any questions community members might want to ask. There is a microphone, there is no-one vetting who is going to get up, there is no-one vetting what the questions are going to be and there is no-one vetting what the statements are going to be. I was so proud to be there as almost the junction between the community that I represent and the cabinet that represents our party and all the people in South Australia. It was just so good.

I remember being here in opposition and lamenting the fact that the Liberals had dropped the whole idea of country cabinets. Their excuse was, 'Oh, we've got members from all around the state in here. We don't need to have country cabinets because we already represent country areas.' That is alright for the one member, but do you know what? I can come in here, I can ring up ministers, I can write to ministers, I can bring up in the party room the issues that we have in our area, but until the cabinet goes as a whole, the discussions do not occur.

We did this as a shadow cabinet as well. The shadow cabinet came down on 20 and 21 January 2020 during the bushfires, while those bushfires still raged across Kangaroo Island. It was a snap decision to bring all the shadow cabinet across. We go as a whole, as a collective, so that we can listen to those stories, we can do the site visits, we can have the meetings, we can see and hear firsthand what those issues are and then, out of that, discussion happens between the ministers. The senior public servants are all there, and they have discussions as well.

I have been a part of this process since 2002. The first country cabinet I ever went to was at Tailem Bend in the electorate of the former Speaker, Peter Lewis. We went to his electorate in 2002. It was the fourth country cabinet that I have been a part of on Kangaroo Island—the first was as a media adviser, the second was as a parliamentary secretary, the third was as a minister, and this one last week was the first time we have had country cabinet where I have been the local MP. That is because the Liberal Party did not turn up; they did not come and listen.

Do you know what they did? After 16 years in opposition, after losing Kangaroo Island and the seat of Mawson by just 115 votes and after having generation after generation of Kangaroo Islanders faithfully voting Liberal, in their very first budget they took away the concession on motor vehicle registration. The hit to the budget was about $1.3 million. The hit to Kangaroo Islanders was a doubling of registration on every vehicle, every trailer and every motorbike that they owned. When you are talking about people who have farms, that is a lot of vehicles.

It also drove the price of freight through the roof. For just one of the many freight carriers on Kangaroo Island, his registration bill went up $70,000. That is just one person—$70,000. As soon as that happened, I started getting a petition together. We had more than half the people of the island sign that petition. The then opposition leader, the now Premier, Peter Malinauskas, said that he would reverse that decision if we were elected.

I had election posters up all around Kangaroo Island saying, 'Vote for me and we will reintroduce the registration concession.' We had another lot of posters up as well. Some were saying, 'Standing up for Kangaroo Island: Leon Bignell,' which obviously I do, but the other one was '$10 million for the Kangaroo Island Hospital.' Not only did we come up with the $10 million but we have put another $5 million in there as well, and yet the Liberal Party at the last election offered nothing to the people of Kangaroo Island in terms of looking after their health.

We heard from that young mum at the community forum about just how difficult things are. Despite the greatest intentions and efforts of the health professionals that we have on Kangaroo Island, it is an isolated community and it is sometimes difficult to be able to get all of the medical requirements that you might need. That is why we are putting in this extra $15 million. That is why we have returned maternity services, birthing services, to the people on Kangaroo Island.

It was great to join with the Premier and the health minister. The health minister, I have to say, is the best guy out in terms of, if I pick up the phone and say, 'We've got this issue,' he always seems to find a solution. We met young Daisy and Adam, these little tiny babies who were born only in the past few weeks on Kangaroo Island. It is a pretty small club to be in, to have a passport that says 'Born in Kingscote', and yet for some time it was not available to expectant parents on Kangaroo Island to have their children born there. They had to come off island several weeks before the due date and have the baby a long way from their family and friends.

One of the great joys in life for those lucky enough to become parents is having your family around you at that time to celebrate this creation of new life and everything else. Can you imagine being from an isolated community like Kangaroo Island where that happens off-island and by the time you get back the grandparents, the aunties and uncles and the siblings of the newborn are really gagging to meet the new one in the family. That is why we do country cabinets: to get out, to listen to people, to talk with people, to learn.

The member for Chaffey said that the Liberal state government can hold its head high for governing for all of South Australia. That is what he said in here. I think they are still tone deaf to the electorate, because if you look at what happened at the last election eight of their MPs lost their seats. If you look at not only the majority that we have in here in terms of numbers of seats won, based on the number of voters that we have, that is one thing, but let's have a look at the land mass of South Australia. We have about a million square kilometres in South Australia. It is a big state, bigger than a lot of European countries, and between the Labor Party and the Independents we hold over 70 per cent of that land mass.

That is 700,000 square kilometres out of a million square kilometres, and yet the member for Chaffey says that the Liberal state government can hold its head high, and he said that Labor is a city-centric government. Well, I do not think that. When you look at the members of cabinet, you have the member for Stuart, who defeated a sitting Deputy Premier to win that seat, and that goes from Port Pirie, Port Augusta, all the way up to the Northern Territory, Queensland, New South Wales border. So he is in the cabinet and he has a fair say. We have Clare Scriven, from another place, in the cabinet, and she is from Mount Gambier.

If you look around our caucus, we have the member for Giles, whose electorate goes from Whyalla, West Port Augusta, Coober Pedy, all the way to the Northern Territory border and across to the Western Australian border. Were you really the government that looked after all of South Australia? That is a question that you probably need to ponder and ask yourselves. I can certainly tell you that there was a lot of love in the room for our cabinet last Thursday and during those site visits that the cabinet did on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. I told a story there, which I have told in this place before, about the first time I turned up as a local MP having won the seat of Mawson by 115 votes.

The first time I turned up on Kangaroo Island as the sitting MP I went out and got in my car the next day, drove around the corner, something felt funny with the car. I get out and yes, sure enough, I had a flat. Then I looked and I had two flats. I went around the other side, I had three flats. Mark Turner at Turner's tyres said, 'Lucky you didn't get four because I have only got three types of that tyre on the island at the moment, so you would have been stuck here for a little bit longer.

I have to say after that less than warm reception I was probably not looking forward to that so much. But, as I said in that room the other night, I did not want that to define me, nor did I want it to define the community of Kangaroo Island, because I knew they were good people. I had spent a lot of time with them and I had decided not to put my hand up to go into the shadow cabinet because I wanted to spend more time with them.

I am so glad I did because we had those terrible bushfires of 2019-20—an awful summer—and a time where, again, these people who think we are the city-centric ones, did not turn up and spend the sort of time you need to spend to get in with the community and find out how you can help. It was left to low-level public servants to help these people in their most desperate hour, and I do not think anyone will ever forgive them for that.

At the election last year, I was watching the results come in, and I got quite emotional to see those booths on Kangaroo Island that had never gone Labor's way, all four booths where people voted for us because of the fact that we listened to them on registration. Liberals, double it. We say we will return the concession, tick, we did it; $10 million for the hospital, tick, we did it. We will be there, we will listen to people, we will do it, we have a track record. So for someone to come in here on the other side whose party has been absolutely humiliated from the city to the far-flung corners of this state, to say that we are the city-centric ones, I don't think so.

Let's look at the seats of Kavel, Independent; Mount Gambier, Independent; Yorke Peninsula, Independent. The member for Finniss is here—almost Independent—and you had a life and death moment there for those few days after the election. You shake your head, mate, but I know that Lou Nicholson—an excellent Independent candidate—almost prevailed in the seat of Finniss. It could have fallen to an Independent. Then, of course, we have the member for Stuart, who is also an Independent and who knocked off the Deputy Premier of the day.

I am really proud of our record. I am proud of all the money that is being invested into regional South Australia and, in particular, into the regional parts of my electorate. I am also really pleased with the continued investment and the expansion of projects which we had already funded back in 2017 and which were then put in the slow lane. In fact, they actually pinched a lane off the Main South Road duplication. It was going to be three lanes.

I tell you what, here is a tip for the people who gave us the one-way expressway: do not come down south and say, 'We've got this great idea. We're going to take your four-lane road and make it a three-lane road, and we're going to give you one lane in one direction and two in the other direction,' because, I tell you what, you are looking for a 16 per cent swing against you when you do that—oh, that is right, you did do it.

Talking about roads, we are going to have a veloway along the Main South Road duplication. One of my mates has spent a lot of time on South Australian roads because he is an endurance rider. I want to send a big cheerio and a big congratulations to Rupert Guinness. I was up in the wee hours of the morning watching him complete the hardest cycling race on earth—almost 3,000 miles from one side of the USA to the other. Rupert and I have known each other since 1994—we met when we were both covering cycling, and I was living in Europe and had a few years in Switzerland working as a freelance journo—and we met down in Palermo in Sicily covering the world cycling championships.

Rupert is one of the nicest blokes you will ever meet. Everyone—all the teams, all the riders—loved talking to him because they had so much respect for him. We had been working together in various roles as journalists, competing against each other for stories but always getting on very well when it came to pizzas in Palermo and maybe the odd beer or cerveza in Spain, and we had a few of those, as well as the birras in Italy. I was the media manager for the Australian cycling team at the world championships in Perth in 1997 and Rupert was over there; again, he was a delight to work with.

Rupert is now an author. He has also been doing ultra cycling for a long time now, and he rode those 2,934 miles in 12 days, 19 hours and 41 minutes. His pit team need a huge round of applause and congratulations because, when Rupert's neck was slumped forward, they had to devise ways to keep his neck upright, such as bike tubes. They ended up gaffer-taping his neck so that his head would stay upright. This is the pain you go through to ride from one side of the USA to the other.

To Rupert, from all your mates back here in Australia, well done. I hope you have had a big sleep and you are having a couple of quiet beers today. Congratulations on coming first in the age  60 to 69 men's category. It was tremendous, and you are only the eighth Australian to achieve this great epic feat of riding across the USA in the hardest possible endurance event known to cycling. To your teams at Trek bikes, Shimano and Wilson Asset Management, I am sure you could not have done it without them either.

On that note, I fully support this bill and all the great improvements we are going to see right here in South Australia.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mr Basham.

Sitting suspended from 12:59 to 14:00.

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