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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-08-21 Daily Xml
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Active Citizenship Convention

Ms HOOD (Adelaide) (14:27): My question is to the Premier. Can the Premier update the house on the Active Citizenship Convention?

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier) (14:27): I want to thank the member for Adelaide for her question because the Active Citizenship Convention, which happened across three days at the Convention Centre led by the Department for Education, is on the back of an initiative that the state government has been rolling out around civics in schools.

I think everybody in this place is already an enthusiastic supporter of the democratic project, and most of us would be aware that democracy around the world is actually going through a pretty testing time at the moment. It is largely true that South Australia in many ways has been insulated from some of the worst impacts of hyperpolarization in the body politic and the growing levels of distrust that we see in democracy and the outcomes of it.

Having said that, while we have been insulated from the worst of it, we are not immune to it and it is important, in the government's view, that we have got to be working together across all political persuasions in making sure that young people understand how the democratic process operates and their role within it.

It is our view that, when it comes to civics, we want to be teaching young people in particular that dismissing politics as being boring or not relevant, or dismissing politicians as being lazy and corrupt—and whatever allegation gets thrown all of our ways at some point or another—can sometimes represent to a degree a lazy approach, rather than actually being honest about the fact that being a citizen in this country brings with it a civic responsibility to vote and care about who you vote for.

But people are only able to do that if they are trained with a basic understanding of our democratic system, which is why we have invested $18 million in civics in schools. We see democracy at the moment a bit like a frog in boiling water. We want young people to be able to make informed judgements based on their understanding of the system. So we are rolling out a program to have teachers better equipped to provide that information in schools.

Also the department, under the auspices of the minister, has been able to put together these democratic conventions, completely nonpartisan in nature. The opposition have been present at them, and we are very grateful for the opposition leader's presence and other opposition MPs. We have been making sure that the media is present and making sure, in terms of the oversight of all this, that the Governor has a role to play to speak to that nonpartisanship. The Governor herself deserves enormous credit for her work around civics, which is a passion of hers as well.

For anyone who had the time to attend one of the conventions—and I know there are a lot of MPs who did—they were a bit of an experiment to see how they would go, and I thought it was really worthwhile. We wanted to get to young kids across all schools—public, Catholic, independent—but also we didn't want to just speak to a bunch of prefects. There is nothing wrong with prefects and school leaders—

Members interjecting:

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS: No, that's right, nothing wrong with them. But we wanted to actually make sure we were getting to other kids as well. There was a real sense of that in the room, that the student body represented the diverse state that we have, which I think is really powerful in and of itself. I want to thank the minister for taking this up and the department for their work. It has been really important, and I hope it is something that everyone in this place thinks is worthy of ongoing support into the future.

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