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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-10-29 Daily Xml
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Outdoor Play Areas

Ms THOMPSON (Davenport) (15:14): A bit of a change of pace: do you remember when we were kids, when you would come home from school or during school holidays and you would be encouraged to be outside? You would not be spending your afternoons and your weekends on a laptop or an iPad or a gaming console—maybe a SEGA Master System for a little while there.

It is now harder than ever for parents to encourage their kids to be outdoors and be active in the afternoons and during school holidays, but there are some incredible kids in my community—Rowan, Fraser, Aren, Akash and Cody—who have been doing exactly this. They have been living like we did when we were kids. They go outside as soon as they get home from school and they do not come home until the street lights come on or until dinner is ready.

They have been really busy. Over the last six to eight weeks they have been out in their local pine forest with their own shovels and they have been digging these little mounds. They have created some very cool one to two-foot high BMX jumps. Just as they finished building these incredible jumps, they came out with their bikes ready to use them only to find that the council had brought in the diggers and cleared up all of their hard work.

Instantly, their response was to go home and jump on their gaming consoles or jump on their iPads. Their parents were devastated by this. They are doing everything they can to keep their kids off their screens and outdoors and active and healthy. The parents in this community started to make a bit of a fuss. I went out and spoke with them and with the kids. The boys took me down through the pine forest to have a look at these very modest jumps that they had created.

The boys have become quite popular in the community now for what they have been trying to achieve and they are known to be extremely respectful and extremely well behaved. They are conscious of the impact they might be having on the environment or the surrounding trails or other park users. They were extremely heartbroken and gutted to find that these jumps were taken away and that council ultimately sent the message that if they were to rebuild these jumps they would also be taken away.

These boys and their parents have come together and, together with me, are calling on the council to work with these local families: to come out and speak to the kids, assess the sites as to whether they are safe, and work with them to be able to continue doing this activity, not just shut them down. There are examples in other councils. This is not unique to Aberfoyle Park or to my electorate of Davenport. I know many other MPs in this place have had similar issues in their own electorates, and we see it right across the country.

There are examples of councils that are managing this well: Tweed Shire Council, Sutherland Shire Council and Nillumbik Shire Council have all shown that basically if you work with your community you can pull together some guidelines and work with those young kids so that they understand what they can and cannot do, to ensure that what they are building in their community is safe and not going to impact other park users. That is what we are calling on the City of Onkaparinga to do now.

Fortunately, the great news is that the council have responded and have already had one of three sessions they will be holding with the young kids in Aberfoyle Park, where the youth team will come out and talk to the kids about what it is they are trying to create in this space and how they can do it safely. I thank the City of Onkaparinga for listening to their community and working with us on this.

Outside of these community-built jumps, there is a fantastic BMX culture in the City of Onkaparinga area. There is one particular park, Serpentine Reserve at O'Halloran Hill, where again the local BMX kids have advocated for the ability to either improve their jumps themselves or to work with council to improve those jumps. They have been successful there in that there will be a dig day coming up in the next month or two, where council will come down with some diggers and with some soil and some shovels and the kids will be able to get involved and help to build these jumps so that they can keep being outdoors and keep being active.

I think it is so important, now more than ever, that we are working with our communities to help parents and help kids, to let our kids be kids and let them be outdoors and as active as they can be. I thank the council for working with the community on this project.