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Legislative Council - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-02-18 Daily Xml
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MEMBER, NEW

The Hon. P. HOLLOWAY (Minister for Mineral Resources Development, Minister for Urban Development and Planning, Minister for Small Business) (16:06): I move:

That this council welcomes the Hon. David Winderlich as a member.

I have pleasure in moving this motion to enable the Hon. Mr Winderlich to make his first speech in this parliament.

Honourable members: Hear, hear!

The PRESIDENT: I remind honourable members that it is the Hon. Mr Winderlich's first speech and ask that he be shown the courtesy that is always shown to those making their first speech.

The Hon. DAVID WINDERLICH (16:07): Thank you, Mr President. I thank you for the warm and friendly welcome I have received from you, Mr President, from other members and from the staff since arriving.

I am not here today because I ever had any sort of long-term plan. I am here because at different times various people have pushed me forward or quickly stepped back when there was a call for volunteers, leaving me stranded. One thing led to another, and this is where it has ended up. I would like to thank some of those people. I thank my predecessor, Sandra Kanck, for her support and advice. I thank all the friends and colleagues who came to witness the election by the Joint Assembly yesterday. I especially thank the people from the Copper Coast who came, and I thank the people from Barmera for all their good wishes.

I particularly thank my wife and children for their support, their refreshing perspective on politics and the constant reality checks they provide me with. One of my daughters pricked up her ears yesterday when she heard 'Mr President' and asked whether Barack Obama was going to be here—confusion brought on, no doubt, by the uncanny physical similarities between our respective presidents! Another of my daughters has dedicated herself to identifying any signs that I am becoming a wanker and ruthlessly stamping out such tendencies.

As a number of you have already told me, being an MP is a great privilege. You get a good wage to do work you passionately believe in (maybe that is one of the perks of being in a minor party), and it is an endlessly fascinating occupation. You can go from a meeting with the AIDS Council to a meeting with the oyster council or from drinks at the RSL to sharing organic grapes at a Friends of the Earth forum—and you can do all that in the same day. Every so often you find yourself in a room where 'every heart is shining with goodwill', as it says in Keating! The Musical, and where the trust and common purpose are so strong that it is electric. Those moments are wonderful, and I had another one of those yesterday.

I will speak very briefly about some of my priorities for the year; one of them has to be the Murray, which I think has to be a priority for any South Australian. We can save it, and we must save it. To state the obvious, without the river there will be no irrigation, no secondary industry along the river and very little tourism. However, the federal government seems to have given up on the Murray and the Darling, and I think the contrast is shown by the differences in the reaction to the global financial crisis, to which tens of billions of dollars were unlocked very quickly compared with the snail's pace of change in response to the death of the Lower Lakes and the various challenges the Murray faces.

The people in the regions in places like the Lower Lakes and Barmera have been magnificent. They have fought very hard for their sections of the river, but the votes are in the city. We must bring the fight to the city, and that is one of the things I will try to do. I will try to help make the Murray a key issue in the next state and federal elections.

A sense of community is very important to me. We heard yesterday in the condolence motions about the bushfires how important that is. It works at much more mundane levels, too, such as whether people are secure in letting their children walk to school or whether a demented grandmother is returned when she wanders. A cohesive community forms an ongoing and informal neighbourhood watch.

It is all too easy to be dazzled by the big end of town. It is all too easy to be seduced by the pleasures of being in the VIP tent at the Clipsal, as opposed to some community hall in a small country town; to take the side of developers over that of communities; to build super schools instead of paying teachers; and to run scare campaigns on crime which cause people to retreat behind security doors and gated communities when they should be on the front veranda sharing a beer and saying hello to passing joggers, people walking their dogs and the passing parade of life.

Communities thrive on hope and trust: they shrivel when they are under a constant barrage of fear and suspicion, so it seems as though in many ways we do not value the grassroots any more. I will do my best to put that back on the agenda.

Accountability has been a critical issue; it has been a critical issue for the Democrats, and it is a very critical issue to ordinary people. Their sense of fair play is offended when they see a lack of accountability. Some councils and some bureaucracies become arrogant and out of touch. We have talked a lot in here and we have heard a lot over the past year about the District Council of the Copper Coast, and another department that is mentioned in this chamber a fair bit is the Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation, which ignored local knowledge on the Lower Lakes, the Upper South-East drains and Lake Bonney.

Time and again the locals have been proved right and the bureaucracy has been proved wrong, but it does not listen. It seems as though some of these bodies feel that they do not have to explain themselves. I will do what I can to ensure that local communities can force such councils, such bureaucracies and ministers to account for their decisions.

There is a lot more that I could say, but I have a whole year to bend your ears, so I will not take much longer. In the 2006 state election I wrote a limerick every day for crikey. I have been asked by a number of people to provide one today. Some of these are very biting and sardonic and some are corny. As befits the occasion, this one is a bit corny. It goes like this:

You can shout at the TV at night

Or climb into the sandpit and fight

But when all's said and done

And the mud has been flung

You're not lost if you still see the light.

This, of course, describes the tension between changing the system and being changed by it. One of my children found a much more down-to-earth way of describing this tension. I have been christened 'MOP' (member of parliament). When I got home last night I found a card, and it read:

Dad, you are a MOP, and MOPS are used to clean up messes. But just because you are a MOP it doesn't mean you have to be smelly.

Thank you for listening; I look forward to working with you.

Motion carried.

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