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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2022-05-17 Daily Xml
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Address in Reply

Address in Reply

Adjourned debate on motion for adoption (resumed on motion).

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Before I call on the member for Frome, I remind members of the house that this is the member's first speech and that she should be accorded the normal courtesies and respect afforded to new members on this important occasion. Member, the floor is yours.

Ms PRATT (Frome) (16:44): Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to speak and recognise the opening of the Fifty-Fifth Parliament of South Australia. My congratulations to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, on being re-elected in this place. I offer my congratulations to all the other members of parliament in this house and all returning members to this place for the Fifty-Fifth Parliament. I also sincerely thank Her Excellency the Governor for opening parliament last sitting week. I thank her for her continued contribution that she is making to our great state, and I especially note her commitment to regional events of significance in my own electorate.

It is a privilege not lost on me that I stand here as the first female member of the country electorate that we all know as Frome, and it is with unabashed pride that I reclaim this seat for the Liberal Party, as I pledged to do over 12 months ago. My first official order of business is to recognise my predecessor, the newly elected member for Stuart, in his role as Minister for Regional Roads, Local Government and Veterans Affairs. He has been generous in his congratulatory comments to me, and I note that we have a shared passion for better access to mental health services across the Mid North. I also look forward to working with him in this Fifty-Fifth Parliament to ensure regional SA continues to benefit from state government funding for regional roads.

However, this neighbourly collaboration is bittersweet as I make mention of the outgoing member for Stuart and former Deputy Premier of South Australia, Dan Van Holst Pellekaan, a gentleman and loyal servant of the Marshall Liberal government who excelled in his portfolio and delivered on our election promises to stabilise the grid.

I am the new custodian of an electorate that is named after General Edward Charles Frome, our colony's third surveyor-general, arriving on the ship Recovery in 1839. New Frome is 200 kilometres long, from Terowie to Two Wells, and it reflects the very best of our state where the pristine samphire coastline hosts our precious international bird sanctuary, where the food bowl of the Adelaide Plains meets the golden canola crops of the Mid North and where the renewable energy landscape of Goyder north runs south into the majesty of World's End Gorge.

At its geographical heart is the Clare Valley, where all four seasons are captured in the cycle of a grapevine, and the green canopy of a riesling varietal can be found draped over the seven hills of this diverse region. Of course, to single out one winery would be career limiting.

If wine is not your thing, Frome can offer you award-winning authors, poets and painters. C.J. Dennis, author of The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, was born in Auburn. Colin Thiele AC of Storm Boy fame was born in Eudunda and of course is featured on the town silo writ large. The Owen silo was painted by Robert Hannaford AM and he was born and continues to live in Riverton. Younger female art professionals, such as Alexia Prokopec, Nadine Grace and Alysha Sparks, have commissions booked well into next year with each of them capturing the glory of our stunning landscape.

Ian Roberts OAM, from my home town of Blyth, was my first introduction to the medium of painting and, given that it is less than eight kilometres outside my electorate, I make no apologies to the member for Narungga that I will poach this town back from him at the very first opportunity.

We are also strong in agricultural industry and manufacturing. In 1932, a bushman from Belalie North called Reg Murray Williams started selling pack saddles to Sir Sidney Kidman to make a quid. No Aussie wardrobe is complete now without the distinctive accessories of moleskins and R.M. Williams boots, which he established exactly 90 years ago. Outback SA fashion was iconic before The Iconic. Young people get it.

In every corner of this electorate there are signs of an industrious workforce, never resting or relying on others. The Bundaleer Forest planted in 1875 was, in fact, our nation's first purpose plantation, while at the southern end of the electorate Laucke Mills had expanded to Eudunda and Kapunda. That same copper town is currently serviced by its biggest employer, J.T. Johnson hay exporter. Of course, not to be outdone, Balaklava is also serviced by hay exporters Gilmac and Balco. I am sure your cupboards are full with San Remo pasta, which has storage facilities in Balaklava and Owen in order to support its 31-year history of growing and buying durum wheat in South Australia.

Early settlers to the Mid North established famous merino studs like Bungaree and Collinsville. We all know the legacy of pastoralist Sir Sidney Kidman and, sadly, lesser known explorers like the intrepid World War I photographer and polar explorer Hubert Wilkins, from Mount Bryan, or the Penwortham early settler John Horrocks, who was shot by his own camel—true story. As it is history month, I make quick reference to the copper mining boom that began in Burra and the freight route of the copper loads to Port Wakefield via Halbury and Balaklava.

But it is the renewable sector that is the cutting edge of innovation in Frome. Wind turbines at Hallett and the big battery at Hornsdale, which the Marshall Liberal government expanded in 2020, were just the beginning. This year, French company Neoen committed to a $3 billion—with a 'b'—investment into a hybrid wind solar battery storage project called Goyder North and Goyder South, not to mention a ringing endorsement from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), which described the interconnector from Robertstown in Frome to Wagga Wagga in New South Wales as a critical, no-regret solution to keeping the lights on in this state. It will have safe passage through the eastern corridor hosted by my neighbour the member for Chaffey.

As an educator, it is also important to remind the chamber that the Roseworthy Agricultural College established in 1936 was the first of its kind in the nation, while also offering the first Diploma of Oenology. Perhaps it is most relevant, though, for me to mention the political contributions from the Mid North: an honorary mention for Sir George Strickland Kingston, who was the deputy surveyor to Colonel Light. He also was our colony's first Speaker of the House of Assembly in the Old Chamber of course. He represented in this order the seat of The Burra and Clare and subsequently the seat of Stanley, both encapsulated in Frome. As the member for Black will attest, I am a former volunteer of this historical home at Kingston House and therefore I am quite pleased with that connection.

Of personal significance, I note former federal members for Wakefield: Charles Allen Seymour Hawker, Charles Robert (Bert) Kelly and Neil Andrew. I also congratulate the new member for Taylor, my neighbour to the south.

In a political twist, my rural district has twice delivered a Liberal member for Adelaide: from Riverton, Trish Worth AM, and preceding her, from Blyth, my dad, Michael Pratt. My very first experience of a maiden speech goes back 34 years. It was April 1988 when in Canberra my father delivered the last ever maiden speech to be heard in Old Parliament House. A week later, my family had the great fortune to attend the opening of the current federal Parliament House. If I may channel Sir Robert Menzies, I will never forget the vision of seeing Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II passing by.

I could do an entire grieve on the foibles and fearlessness of my father, which he would love, but I will not—not happening today, not today. People call Pratty when they need help or a laugh or both. Mr Yellow Pages, I have heard him called, and it is quite fitting. He is an ideas man and a rogue. He has been a Japanese movie industry heart-throb—also a true story—and one of the most entertaining charity auctioneers this state has ever seen.

Our family life on the farm at Sandaroo was idyllic, as all flashbacks are, but my parents made some very brave futureproofing decisions as it became apparent we would need more land just to break even. So when an opportunity came along to run in the 1988 by-election for the federal seat of Adelaide, my father threw all his energy at it, defeating Labor in its heartland. Timing is everything in politics. Our family rode the inevitable bumps of losing an election and it stung us for many years. That adversity held me in good stead for later years, but throughout high school I only had eyes for a teaching career.

It was in 1990 when the nation's Treasurer told us that this was the recession we had to have. Thousands of families were forced to consolidate finances, and we were no different. We worked our way back, but it took my parents years to recover from double-digit interest rates. I quickly learned to manage my expectations about hard work versus reward and the importance of good governance and fiscal responsibility. During this challenging time, it was mum who got us all through—no surprise. She is an elegant, unassuming lady. In her life, she has cooked for shearer gangs and catered for classical concerts; she has fed premiers and consuls.

But most people do not know that to help us get by for a decade my mum worked the 6am shift at Vili's bakery making pasties and making money to keep us going. Rosemary Milisits and her late husband, Vilmos, were very good to our family and many others over decades and, in turn, every member of my family ended up working in Vili's business. I am sure it was no accident. I echo previous condolences from this place on his passing and recognise the generosity of these two great benefactors to our state. As a Hungarian postwar refugee, Vili was determined that with his bakery no-one he knew need ever go without food, so I cannot imagine what he would think about the senseless war in Ukraine.

Working at Vili's put me through university and after graduating I was desperate to return home to the Mid North to teach. In fact, the age gap was right that, if I was lucky, I might have ended up teaching my young cousins—and I hope they are watching and tuning in today: you are lucky. You probably dodged a bullet. It was not to be. The education department instead sent me to the bottom of the state to teach primary school French. I relocated to the frosty climes of the South-East, where I never had to water my garden or install an air conditioner.

Teaching in the country changed my life forever. While I was busy creating lesson plans, driving the school bus, conducting the choir and coaching the debating team, I was also developing my own views about what good leadership looked like. I became passionate about staff welfare. I was confronted daily by the impacts of long-term generational unemployment and by the positive power of education.

The life I live today has been shaped by my formative years as a teacher, and I recognise the positive influence from the following passionate country educators: school leaders Liz Noske, the late Julie Howie, John McCade, the late Rob Shepherd, and my very special friends Bec Maddigan, Sarah Vinall and Helen Widdison. Collectively, their influence guided me to fight for the rights of individuals, to expect the best from every student and not the worst, to debate curriculum and department policy.

Most precious of all, teaching introduced me to brain theory and to neuroscience, which in fact changed my own brain and teaching practice for good. If mechanics must train to understand car engines and doctors must train to understand anatomy, then every graduate teacher should train to understand how the brain functions. Our entire system of testing and reporting is predicated on the student being able to recall and retrieve information from their long-term memory. Teachers help students to create these lifelong memories.

My own memories take me back to days of being a frontline public servant, protecting students from themselves, their family and sometimes even other teachers' unreasonable expectations. I became a court advocate for students more than once. I conducted risky home visits to drug-dealing parents without hesitation to check on a student's welfare. I was thrust into the world of kinship and residential care agreements, and I understand well the horrors of making mandatory notifications after a students' disclosure.

Even still, teaching is a wonderful vocation. It taught me selflessness and sacrifice. I discovered my passion for helping others, fighting for those who do not have a voice, and it taught me how to compromise. Working with students and families, I developed a guiding mantra to manage my expectations but to keep my standards high, and those learnings have travelled with me to this place.

Since my swearing-in ceremony, I now have one singular opportunity to outline my own priorities as a newly minted member of the 55th South Australian parliament, an opportunity to imagine forward to a future where I will be measured against commitments I make today on behalf of the voters of Frome, who put their faith in me to represent them with integrity.

Even members of the public who remained disengaged and disenchanted with politics and politicians cast their vote back in March and participated in our democratic process that Winston Churchill once deemed the very worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. He added that no-one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. But voters are encouraged by mainstream and social media to collectively denigrate this imperfect democracy and participate in a national blood sport of hunting elected representatives until their best or only option is to quit.

And so I return to my mantra: manage your expectations, but keep your standards high. Just think about it: we all have expectations, but in the political sphere it is voters who expect much of us. By the Oxford definition, they have a strong belief that something will happen. Reading a Quarterly Essay in 2012 challenged me at the time to reflect on a voter's perception of politics—on all voters' perceptions of politics, in fact—and 10 years on, that essay, entitled Great Expectations, holds true.

Picking up an observation made by former Senator Amanda Vanstone, the author Laura Tingle opined that voters are angry because they have expectations that have not been met. They are sceptical about why people enter politics. But observing the class of 2022, they should not have any doubt. In 2012, Tingle wrote:

Our expectations of what government will do have seemed to grow over the years. Of course it will be there to assist us after bushfire or flood, not just with our immediate emergency needs but also by helping with rebuilding and providing income support. When we travel to war-torn and unstable countries, we expect government to rescue us from trouble and sometimes to get us home.

How prescient. Every member here shares an obligation to bring voters along with us as we debate legislation and make laws that must improve the lives of others. We can actually start those conversations in the classroom as well as with our own constituencies.

As the member for Frome, I will continue to engage fully with my electors, communicate in a way that does not overpromise nor under-deliver. The Marshall Liberal government met expectations by investing over $100 million in new Frome in pools, schools and clubs alone. I am so very grateful to the voters in my electorate who placed their trust in me and resoundingly elected a female Liberal member. In Frome, I hope that we continue to manage our expectations and keep our standards high.

As I stand here today, I note that I am the sum of my experiences, and many people feature in the retelling of my life such as it is. I am overjoyed to share this moment with beloved family and friends and publicly extend my deepest love for my parents, Michael and Dianne, as well as my aunty and uncle, Meredith and Rob. Every campaign, whether successful or just falling short, demands much from our volunteers and supporters. I am extremely grateful not just to those who assisted me during the election period but to every volunteer and branch member who has ever said yes to helping out on polling day.

Of particular note, I wish to thank Malcolm Dixson, who is well known to the Liberal family. He was dedicated in his quest to save the Repat, and we did, and he continues to be a positive influence on us all. The Frome campaign was fuelled not just by the best schnitzels at the Sevenhill pub but by the energy of my committee members: Richard Daley, Malcolm Bartholomaeus, Craig Honan, Jason Noble, Ian Jenkins, Bec Long and James Long. I thank you all for your support and for travelling here today. In addition to this, I was assisted daily by Scott Kennedy, Bethany Flight, Anna Tsirigotis and Sam Diprose. I am thankful for their guidance, friendship and expertise.

I recognise the presence of former member for Elder, Carolyn Power, and her husband, Brad, and I thank you for your friendship. I wish to thank our new party leader, the member for Black, for his friendship and encouragement over many years. We seem to have come full circle from my time supporting your own campaign and inevitable entry to this illustrious place in 2014, and I am proud to echo your own first speech sentiments in return. Thank you for giving me the opportunity as a shadow minister to be a strong voice for health and, indeed, health services in the regions, to promote wellbeing and to be an advocate for ageing.

To our state's 46th Premier I owe much. Thank you to the member for Dunstan for his encouragement and belief in my ability to serve our party in any capacity. Moreover, I wish to thank him for his unrelenting service to our state—it cannot be said often enough. I have mentioned all my parliamentary neighbours bar one: the member for Schubert. Thank you for your friendship. You know what it means to me. I am really excited by the prospect of serving our first term together. We both have a brother living in Perth, and by the virtues of the live broadcast I send my thanks and my love to James, Anna and little H. I cannot wait to meet my nephew, but you have to make sure that the barracks for the Crows, not the Eagles.

So, in sympathy with the member for Morialta, I am a Crows tragic. Like politics, Aussie Rules has afforded me the sweetest of victories in the most bitter of losses. I grew up in awe of the early players—the Jarman brothers, Mods, Roo, Goody, McLeod and now Tex—but I would jump off the couch for Eddie. He retired after the 2019 season ended, with no chance of playing a farewell game.

An honourable member interjecting:

Ms PRATT: It was a shame. I will try to get over it. Elections can be like that: not every member of parliament chooses the timing of their departure. I am not planning on going anywhere, but I have taken the opportunity today to use my first speech to pre-empt my last speech. I love my electorate, I love my job, I love my home, and I encourage you all to come and visit our beautiful region. As you drive along the Max Fatchen Way, the Horrocks Highway, the Thiele Highway and the RM Williams Way you can be sure you are in Frome. #RegionsMatter.

Honourable members: Hear, hear!

The Hon. B.I. BOYER (Wright—Minister for Education, Training and Skills) (17:12): It is a great pleasure to rise in this place and speak about some local issues in the seat of Wright, which I am honoured to have been re-elected to for another four years, and, of course, I thank my constituents and the members of the public in the north-eastern suburbs who have shown their faith in me by giving me another four years to represent them.

I should pay special mention to at least half of Modbury North, which is a suburb I now share with the member for Newland but which is new to the seat of Wright, and I say farewell to the very good people of the suburb of Brahma Lodge, who have returned to the member for Ramsay against my wishes. Nonetheless, I am sad to see them go and, in particular, the fantastic relationship that I have had with the Brahma Lodge Football Club. The member for Ramsay's ears must have been burning because she heard I was going to take Brahma Lodge back and she has just wandered into the chamber.

I should explain, though, that I have to wear this scarf during my address here. It is the Golden Grove Football Club’s—

An honourable member: Shame!

The Hon. B.I. BOYER: —yes, 'shame' indeed—colours, because I stupidly went into a bet with the new member for King in the local derby between the Golden Grove Kookaburras, which is the member for King's team, and the Modbury Hawks Football Club, which is the team of the member for Newland and me.

The original bet that we laid out was that the loser, who as you can see now is me, would mow the lawn of the winner wearing the team colours of the successful team. Unfortunately, the member for King does not have any lawn at her place, or so she tells me. I suspect she does and does not care and wants me to get up and wear this instead, so this is penance for a silly bet that I made, and I am making good on it. Congratulations to the Kookaburras, and I sincerely hope that when the rematch comes around we absolutely pump you.

Could I perhaps start by acknowledging how fortunate and proud I am to be re-elected to this place. It is not an honour that I think anyone in here takes for granted. I think it is true to say—and I am sure you would agree with this yourself, Mr Deputy Speaker—that as the member of a seat that has been marginal for a very long time, since its inception in 1993, it is not something that you take for granted. You are always fighting for your survival, and certainly that was the mentality I took to representing my constituents between 2018 and the most recent election.

Nonetheless, it was a pretty overwhelming result for the new Malinauskas Labor government. I will be honest and say that it was not one that I anticipated. I think everyone just put their noses to the grindstone and worked as hard as they could. Certainly, some of the members sitting here to my left, three new members of parliament, led the way in the incredible amount of direct voter contact that they had since becoming candidates for the Labor Party. That was inspirational for me as someone who was getting towards the end of his first term and trying to find the motivation to get back out on the hustings, knock on doors and make phone calls, which, as enjoyable as it can be sometimes, can also be very hard work.

The message I want to pass on to the people I represent across the suburbs of Salisbury East (which I share with the member for King), Wynn Vale, Gulfview Heights, Redwood Park, Surrey Downs, half of Modbury North (I do not think I am forgetting anything there) and Modbury Heights is that I thank you for the support you have shown and the confidence you have placed in me. Despite the fact that I also now have the privilege of being the Minister for Education, Training and Skills, which I will get onto in a second, I intend to give you the same strong and active representation I gave you in the first four years because you deserve it.

The seat of Wright is my home. I live in Gulfview Heights. My three daughters go to a public primary school in the seat I represent. My wife plays for the local hockey side, I play some very average amateur basketball at the Golden Grove Recreation and Arts Centre and we both do a bit of volunteering. I am proud to say that the area I represent in this place is well and truly my home and my family's home as well.

Before I go back to a few of the commitments we made locally in the seat of Wright, which I am very excited to have an opportunity now for us to deliver upon, I will lay out some of the commitments that the Malinauskas Labor government has made more broadly in the education, training and skills portfolio. After having been returned as the member for Wright, and having been the shadow minister for a relatively short period of time before that, I did not take for granted that I would automatically find a place on the front bench when government came around.

I was fortunate enough to stay there and to keep the portfolios I had, with the exception of veterans affairs, which has gone elsewhere but no doubt will be very well looked after. One of the proudest moments I had during my time as shadow minister was when I got to join the then Leader of the Opposition, Peter Malinauskas, and the then Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Susan Close, at the Convention Centre, I think it was, for what was really the first in a series of election commitments that the Malinauskas Labor team were making in the lead-up to the state election.

There was an obvious tendency and an obvious leaning towards focusing exclusively on health and our response to the global pandemic, given that it was roughly October 2021 when we were making these announcements and the media was once again swamped by all the complications of how we were trying to deal with COVID-19 in our community. An obvious response that we could have made was simply to focus all our election commitments, certainly the first ones that we made, completely on how we responded to COVID-19 and health exclusively.

I think it was a very bold but ultimately a very wise decision by the now Premier—and this of course goes back to the motto that we took through the campaign of For the Future—that what we needed to start looking at, and very much what the South Australian public were looking for, was a party and a government with a view to how things could be once the worst of the pandemic was over.

Of course there are a number of things which are key to that. Health is one and education is very much so. The truth is that, as tough as the last 2½ years have been on so many people—and certainly I have met lots of people who would be in the more vulnerable category in the seat of Wright who have had a pretty horrendous 2½ years through contracting COVID themselves, being a close contact, losing family members to COVID or simply people whose health is so vulnerable that they have decided to retreat somewhat from society to protect themselves—what we decided to do back in October was lead with policies about education instead.

I think there was risk in that. There was genuine risk that the South Australian public and the government at the very least would respond by saying this is out of touch or out of step. Why is this opposition, who wants to be the government in five short months, not talking about the pandemic that we are dealing with now? I think time told us, as those months went past and we got to the 19 March election, that we had actually hit the nail on the head in terms of what the South Australian public were looking for, for its next government.

The first thing we announced as part of a suite of education election commitments was that we would be delivering universal three-year-old preschool for South Australian kids, and that as part of that we would hold a royal commission into how that very significant and complex structural change to our education system in South Australia would actually be delivered.

You do not have to go far now to see the abundance of research about just how important the first 1,000 days of a child's life actually are. I think the research shows, and it was certainly something that former Premier Jay Weatherill used to talk about all the time, that 90 per cent of the brain development of a child is complete in the first five years of that child's life. The need for us to focus on those first five years, on the early years, and invest as much of the state's resources and taxpayer dollars in those years is really important.

Not only is it just the right thing to do, in terms of making sure that those young people get the best start in life that they possibly can, but it is also the wisest decision from an investment standpoint in terms of the return government gets on that child's life trajectory and seeing the successes that they will have if they get the first five years right as they go on to primary school, secondary school, maybe vocational education and training, university or straight into a job.

The thing that we always have to grapple with in government is accepting that, although investing in the early years can come at considerable cost, when we actually look at what governments spend down the track, if we do not get those early years of a child's life right and they for some reason get onto a path that could be complex issues around mental health or homelessness, sometimes that path leads to things like incarceration or long-term unemployment.

Ultimately, the state, and therefore the taxpayer, spends vastly more on trying to help that person at the tertiary end of their life than they would have had we invested in the early years. All that research shows the best bang for buck in terms of investing in the earlier years is three-year-old preschool. We have committed to moving to three-year-old preschool and in fact we have committed to that starting in this term of government.

I look forward to, I hope in the not too distant future, being able to talk in more detail about who we will have as the royal commissioner, who will have the very big task of looking at how we deliver this very significant reform and locking down the terms of reference and all the different things they are going to look at, which include things around the quality of out-of-school hours care, accessibility of out-of-school hours care, and the kind of support that we put around families, particularly working families, who are looking for care and education for their children that will enable them to either stay in the workforce or get back into the workforce without necessarily having to juggle the 3 o'clock or 3.15 pick-up every day.

Not long after that, I also joined the now Premier and now Deputy Premier to announce that a Malinauskas Labor government would be building five technical colleges across South Australia. These will be technical colleges for years 10, 11 and 12 students at five different sites. We have now named those sites; in fact, we named all five of them before the election. There will be one technical college in Mount Gambier and one in Port Augusta, and the three metropolitan locations will include the Tonsley TAFE site in the south, Findon High School in the west and The Heights School in the north-east. If we are able to deliver them in the fashion that we would like, these colleges will be transformative.

Many members of this place will know how successful the model of technical colleges that has been delivered by the Catholic sector in South Australia for a number of years now has been. In the area that I represent in the north-east—not far from your seat, Mr Deputy Speaker—is St Patrick's Technical College, which is an incredibly successful model out there. I know that many young people from the seats of King and Newland choose to finish year 9 and start year 10 at St Pat's. We have Western Technical College in the west and we also have Cardijn College in the south. People are voting with their feet and choosing those models.

We are going to make sure that, in addition to having those Catholic technical colleges, we will also have public offerings. We are aiming to locate those in the five locations that I mentioned; not to be setting them up in competition with the fantastic Catholic technical colleges that we already have but to complement those. People will have choice in terms of whether they would like to do it in a non-government setting and to make sure that people have something that is near to them. I am very excited about this. I know that this has really been the brainchild of the Premier, Peter Malinauskas. He has pushed this really hard, and I feel really excited to have the opportunity as education minister to deliver on that vision of his.

In the early weeks since becoming education minister, I have spoken on a number of occasions about my vision for the education system and where there might be any points of difference between me as minister and the former minister, and between the former Liberal government and the new Malinauskas Labor government. Given what I have spoken about, it is timely that I mention today, given that our years 3, 5, 7 and 9 students are currently undergoing NAPLAN, that although this government firmly believes that there is a place for NAPLAN—and we do want to see our NAPLAN and our PISA scores improve across the board—whenever we are talking about student achievement and improving the academic results of our students, whether they go to government schools or non-government schools, we also need to be talking about wellbeing. That conversation is more important now than it has ever been.

The feedback I have been getting from school sites, and directly from principals and teachers, is that they feel the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of the wellbeing and mental health of both our teaching and learning workforce—and there are some 279,000 students in South Australia. The effects of COVID upon those people has not fully washed through yet. In fact, we are going to see that wellbeing, their mental health, probably continue to suffer even as we are coming out of the pandemic.

My point and my philosophy have been that if we want to achieve the uplift in academic achievement in tests like NAPLAN and PISA we cannot expect the improvement if the mental health and wellbeing of our students undertaking those tests is shot to pieces. It is illogical and nonsensical to think that we are going to improve those scores while kids are not in a healthy state of mind and able to perform to the best of their ability. If there is a change in focus from this new government in terms of our approach to education, it would be to make sure that whenever we talk about academic achievement, whenever we talk about NAPLAN—and we are always going to be talking about that, and they are important indicators of our education system—we have to talk about wellbeing as well.

That brings me to the next major election commitment made by the Malinauskas Labor team, which was to invest an extra $50 million over four years in having another 100 staff in the education department to support the wellbeing of students. Currently, we have approximately 200 of those. With that $50 million of money, we have committed to employ another 100, so it will be the single largest increase in the wellbeing supports provided by the department that we have ever seen.

We know that, although it is a very big increase, it probably is not even going to touch the sides in terms of what is actually needed out there. I do not want to lead people to believe that this is a silver bullet for all the issues we face in our schools in terms of people's wellbeing. I know that more investment and more support are needed, but I look forward to delivering on that.

I think that we can probably link using those wellbeing officers directly to what I hope will be an improvement in our NAPLAN results. They will include professionals, such as occupational therapists, speech therapists, child psychologists and counsellors, who will be able to go out into our schools not only to support the students who might be grappling with all those kinds of issues but also to help our education workforce to have the skills to better support those kids themselves because they have done it really tough as well.

They have had a very hard 2½ years. In the many opportunities I have had since becoming minister to get out to schools and talk to staff and students, I have always not only made a point of thanking them for the stoic way they stood by in the classroom while other people were able to work from home but also told them that, even as someone who was the shadow minister for education and now fortunate enough to be the minister, I certainly had real feelings of guilt dropping my kids off at the classroom doorstep and waving goodbye and teachers being faced with a classroom of 25 to 30 kids they were still teaching to make sure they could have an education, even through a global pandemic when other people had the opportunity to go home perhaps and work virtually.

I think it is very important that we keep that in mind and also acknowledge that we have a workforce that is exceptionally tired, a workforce that is in some degrees a bit worn out and that has been operating at a heightened state of anxiety for a very long period of time. As the minister, I want to do everything in my power to make sure that we support them as well as our students.

In the time remaining to me, I might speak briefly about some of the great local election commitments made by the Malinauskas Labor team. One that I will begin with has already been spoken about in some excellent detail by the new member for Newland and that is what has been an issue for decades in the north-eastern suburbs—the Community Wastewater Management System.

I do not think there is any need for me to go into the ins and outs of septic tanks yet again in this place. We have all had well and truly enough of that. It is good that we are now in a place where we have a plan to fix these things and, as I have been saying, move the north-eastern suburbs into the 20th century. It is not the 21st century because sewered blocks were something of a long time ago and unfortunately people in the north-eastern suburbs have still been dealing with—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: That was Gough Whitlam's promise to the western suburbs of Sydney.

The Hon. B.I. BOYER: Is that right? Well, you now have the Malinauskas Labor government's commitment to the 4,700 households in the north-eastern suburbs who are still on septic tanks. We have made a commitment that we will transition them, and I think it is from 1 July this year, in fact, that they will be able to move over and start paying the fixed sewer rate from SA Water instead of the rapidly increasing CWMS rate they pay for the obvious luxury of having their septic tank pumped.

The truly ridiculous thing of all this is that the fee those residents have been paying has been steadily increasing because, as the septic system has got older and older, across the last four years the number of blockages in the system has increased by 100 per cent, according to a statistic I saw. This is a system that is basically set to explode.

We are putting more and more money into just maintaining it and keeping it running and, in the meantime, we are charging residents who are stuck on these septic tanks up to $800 just for the luxury of having someone come around and pump their septic tanks. I am pleased that at last this is going to be fixed, and I look forward to working with the member for Newland and the Minister for Environment, the Deputy Premier, as we make good on that commitment.

Modbury Hospital is a perennial election issue in the north-eastern suburbs, of course. I must say that, although it has had an interesting history, to say the least, in terms of things that have happened at the hospital over many years, I am pleased the political attention it has received perhaps over the last two elections has resulted in some really fantastic commitments and new investments at the hospital.

The commitments were made by Minister Picton, then the shadow minister for health and Peter Malinauskas, and they joined the members for Newland, King, Playford and Torrens as we made the commitment for a new cancer centre at Modbury Hospital, including chemotherapy so people who were getting treatment for cancer could get that treatment closer to home and make it easier for their loved ones to support them while they are undergoing that treatment. As to more mental health beds, of course we know the severity of that issue and we know how great the shortage is in terms of available mental health beds, in not just the north-eastern and northern suburbs but across the state. More subacute beds are an issue as well.

Anyone who has been out to the north-eastern suburbs who does not reside in the area and has raised the issue of Modbury Hospital with residents would know pretty quickly how passionate people are about it. I still bump into people in the area who are obviously older now but who speak emotionally about how they chose the north-eastern suburbs, often back in the seventies, because they had a hospital of their own on their doorstep.

We need to understand this place, and it took me some time as a member of parliament in the area to fully understand that in many cases people chose the north-eastern suburbs to be near Modbury Hospital. When political parties, no matter what colour they are, start mucking around with Modbury Hospital, they rightly get very angry. I am pleased to say that what we are going to see across the next four years is further investment that will secure the future of Modbury Hospital.

A bit more locally in the seat of Wright, we are going to do a very big upgrade to Wynn Vale Drive, which is a connector road that links the suburbs of Wynn Vale, up the hill, with Salisbury East, down the hill, and through Gulfview Heights in the middle. It is one of those roads that has increased usage now. It has a couple of schools sitting on it. It has what I think is the most dangerous intersection, at the bottom of Wynn Vale Drive where it meets Bridge Road in Salisbury East. If people want to do a right-hand turn, which almost no-one tries anymore because you are taking your life in your hands, to get across four lanes of traffic it cannot be done without doing it in two stages.

There has been a lot of advocacy from local people over many years to do something about it, and a lot of those local people are not necessarily people who use the intersection themselves but who live in nearby streets used by motorists to avoid this intersection, which is incredibly dangerous as well. We will be putting traffic lights at the intersection of Bridge Road and Wynn Vale Drive. We will be adding a few other indented bus bays so that the bus that runs along there, which was delivered by the former government—and I will give them credit for that—can pull off the road at each point to enable cars to get past.

We are also going to have a look at what we do at the intersection at the other end of Wynn Vale Drive where it meets The Golden Way, which is very similar to the same problem at the bottom of the hill, except you can do the turn in two stages, but which is a bit of a nightmare during school drop-off and pick-up times. We are going to look at what kind of solution we can find that may not be traffic lights, given the number of traffic lights along The Golden Way now. The member for King and I added them up and there are a lot. If you get all reds, you are stuck there for a long time. It is on our radar, we know how important it is to the community and we will finally be delivering the upgrades to Wynn Vale Drive.

I mentioned the Modbury Hawks. Although they let me down in the derby and have inadvertently led me to be wearing this scarf today in here, they are a fantastic local club. The three of us here—the members for Wright, King and Newland—have all spent time there. It is one of the most welcoming sporting organisations I have ever been to. There are places in this job, Mr Acting Speaker, and you will know this, where sometimes it feels like work, but you still need to do it. Sometimes there are other places that when you are there it does not feel like work at all; it feels like spending time with friends and enjoying yourself.

I am always keen to take my three daughters along because the management and the families at the club always make a great effort to involve them and make the kids feel at home. You can go along on a weekend and watch a game, have a beer, have a snag and hopefully watch them pump the Kookaburras and generally have a really good time.

I am pleased that finally after 160 years—Modbury Hawks is 160 years old, an incredibly old and proud club that has been underinvested in by political parties of all persuasions for too long—we will now be delivering a much-needed upgrade to that club. I know that they are incredibly excited about it. This week, the member for Newland and I joined them as they turned on their new LED lights, which have been funded by the council. The next step will be the upgrade that will be delivered by the Malinauskas Labor government, and I will be very excited to finally deliver some new infrastructure to what is not just a great sporting club but a really important community club in our area that looks after its players and families.

I thought in the last three minutes I have I should say some thankyous to people who have been integral in my being able to do my work as the member for Wright and as the shadow minister, now Minister for Education. First, I would like to thank the opponents I contested for the seat of Wright. Chiefly I would like to thank Mr Graham Reynolds who was a councillor at Salisbury council. He would be known to many people here. He is a fundamentally decent person who has done the honourable thing by his party on more than one occasion with very minimal support in seats that have been pretty tough to win. He is a genuine local person who lives in Salisbury East. He works hard for his community.

I was very impressed by him. It did not particularly surprise me, but when I went along to the declaration of the poll at a recreation reserve, it was a crowd of three. There was my office manager, Kristianne Foreman; myself; and Graham Reynolds. Despite the fact that it was the world's smallest crowd and we were sitting in the foyer of a basketball stadium on three plastic chairs, Graham still made the effort to stand up and give a very generous speech to me.

We both agreed that it had been an incredibly fair fight and we agreed when he was preselected and we bumped into each other all the time that we would make sure it was a fair fight because we both knew that was the right thing, but we both also acknowledged that our communities do not want to see politicians scrapping with one another. It is not a very good look. I want to thank Graham for the way he conducted his campaign. I know that he will go on to serve the community in some kind of role for many years to come.

I thank my electorate office staff, Kristianne Foreman and Josh Weidenbach. We all know that these are tough jobs. They are the ones at the front counter when we have constituents come in with tricky problems. We all have those constituents we might refer to as 'frequent flyers' who like to pop in every day just to have a bit of a chat and say hello. I have constantly had fantastic feedback about my staff, not only for the fact that they are all local—they all live in or just outside the seat—but also for the fantastic way they treat the people of Wright. I look forward to continuing to work with them both for the next four years.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mr Teague.


At 17:43 the house adjourned until Wednesday 18 May 2022 at 10:30.


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