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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2024-04-09 Daily Xml
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Gather Round

Ms CLANCY (Elder) (14:51): My question is to the Premier. Can the Premier please update the house on the recent Gather Round?

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier) (14:51): I thank the member for Elder for her question. I think the success of Gather Round has been well covered in various circles. I think there is no denying that it has been a really big, successful weekend for our state and, importantly, not just for our city but also for parts of our regions. As a government, we are keen to make sure that Gather Round remains an ongoing success and delivers the return on investment to our state in a really purposeful and meaningful way. We are looking to make sure we do that through sharing Gather Round with other places in our state.

We were very pleased yesterday to announce the next big step for Gather Round, one that I am sure the member for Schubert supports because I know she has been an advocate for it: we will see a Gather Round game in the Barossa Valley, specifically at Lyndoch. I want to put on the record my gratitude and thanks to Mayor Bim Lange for his support and the council's support. What we are seeing is a fifty-fifty investment between the state government and the Barossa Council to get that particular facility up and running in time for next year's Gather Round.

Without labouring the point around the economic success, which I think speaks for itself because it has absolutely shot the lights out, the one point that is worthy of emphasis is how much work has gone on behind the scenes to bring this to life. The Minister for Tourism will well know that her whole team in the SATC have worked so incredibly hard, an extraordinary group of South Australians who really take seriously their work, and they understand the opportunity that Gather Round presents to the state. I will come back to that in a moment.

The amount of pride that I was able to see in the eyes of people who had something to do with Gather Round was amazing. I am talking about people working at the event. Adelaide Oval staff, people at the boom gates of the car park, people pouring beers, the administration: these are good, hardworking South Australians who understood that they were making a contribution to something that lifted the state up a little bit.

I was so happy for them, let alone all the people working in the hospitality sector throughout the state. There were many overtime shifts. I chatted to a gentleman near Adelaide Oval who was dropping people off to the hotel there and I took the opportunity to say, 'Have you had a busy weekend?' and he said, 'The best ever.' He runs his own little business just doing chauffer work, running people to and from the airport. He said, 'I have been doing wineries and I've done a million airport runs.' He said, 'The whole thing is fantastic.'

From the grounds people at Adelaide Oval, the people from the Norwood council, the team of people working in Mount Barker, the vendors at Mount Barker—I read a beautiful Facebook post from the butcher who was supplying meat to the game—all these people took pride in contributing to Team South Australia and on the weekend it felt as though there was Team South Australia stepping up to the plate. These are good people who deserve much praise.

The final thing in the 15 seconds I have left: the misunderstanding, though, is just to focus on Gather Round in terms of the dollars through the till. It is so much more than that. It is actually about resetting and recasting the way the rest of the nation looks at South Australia. We are no longer the butt of jokes, we are the source of envy around the country and Gather Round puts that on display. I want to thank every South Australian who contributed to that effort. There was a great number of very good people who worked hard over the weekend. Gather Round belongs to them more than anyone.

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