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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-11-26 Daily Xml
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Social Statement

Ms STINSON (Badcoe) (14:31): My question is to the Premier. Can the Premier update the house on South Australia's social statement?

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier, Minister for Defence and Space Industries) (14:31): I thank the member for Badcoe for her question. Frequently in recent years the government has been fortunate to be able to acknowledge and celebrate significant milestones or indicators that have been released publicly outside of government on the state's relative economic performance. There have been some very strong economic developments in this state in recent years and economic growth remains strong.

We are also alive to a couple of things as a government. The first thing is that although the economy in South Australia is performing well relative to the rest of the country, although there is genuine growth within our economy coming from a range of sources, it's also true that that growth and that experience does not necessarily translate to improved living standards for everybody. One of the jobs of government is to make sure that in economic times such as these, we are trying to include as many people in being a beneficiary of improved living standards by sharing wealth and opportunity the best way we can.

The government has a range of policies that seek to address this challenge, not just in terms of cost of living but more structurally in the way we set up society, particularly when we think about young people. It is also true that this effort has to be sustained and ongoing, no different to economic development policy, where you can't say 'job done' at any point. In a competitive world you've got to keep the effort up, which is why earlier this year I announced the government's intention to deliver a social statement.

I appreciate the member for Badcoe's interest in this subject matter—that has been enduring for as long as she has been involved in public life—and now as a mother herself I know she has a particular interest in making sure that young Quinn grows up in a fair and equitable society.

I am pleased to report today that the government intends to hand down its social statement at the beginning of the new year in advance of the caretaker period. There has been a lot of work that has been undertaken across the government in the preparation of this policy statement. DPC has been leading the work, not just in coordinating government but also through active engagement with the not-for-profit sector and other civil society institutions. I want to thank all those organisations outside of government, and also inside government, that have helped contribute through the consultation process. It helps illuminate the acuteness of some of the challenges in communities throughout the state that exist in all our electorates.

Almost every electorate in this state will have pockets of disadvantage—some more than others, clearly—and all of us would be alive to the fact that there are cohorts of people who do turn to government to try to make a difference where we can. We are not naive to the fact that many of these challenges are structural and intergenerational, and that means that no government has a single silver-bullet policy solution, otherwise a government somewhere would have deployed it by now. But you can try to make a difference. You can try to make change.

One example that we are very pleased with how it's going thus far is the Children in the North program that is quietly just going about doing its work in the northern suburbs of Adelaide. A number of agencies are contributing to it and it's working well. So, to the extent that the social statement outlines a framework for work like that to continue in the future, we believe it is important and we look forward to releasing it early in the new year.

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