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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2010-10-27 Daily Xml
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PARKS COMMUNITY CENTRE (PRESERVATION OF LAND AND SERVICES) BILL

Introduction and First Reading

The Hon. R.L. BROKENSHIRE (16:50): Obtained leave and introduced a bill for an act to make provision for the preservation and use of the Parks Community Centre for the benefit of the community and for other purposes. Read a first time.

Second Reading

The Hon. R.L. BROKENSHIRE (16:51): I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

It is very sad indeed that I am moving this bill today. I believe that many members of the government, I would assume including you, Mr Acting President, and the President, consider that this budget has brought some sadness in its slashing of public servants' leave entitlements, and the Parks Community Centre is another issue that has brought great sadness amongst the Labor-voting western suburbs; and now there is an amazing backflip. This bill is about helping Labor to walk the walk instead of just talk the talk on the Parks never closing. The Parks Community Centre was a project of the Dunstan government. The Parks was opened sometime in 1978 or 1979. It cost $16 million to build and was funded jointly by state and federal government, with the former Enfield Council contributing to the cost of constructing the swimming pool and library.

After the victory of the Tonkin Liberal government, the new opposition leader, the Hon. John Bannon, who was also the local member at the time that the Parks opened, said in a media release in late 1979 that the Parks was, 'one of the most notable community projects in the whole of Australia and one which has attracted international interest', and that he would 'always be happy to use whatever influence I possess to safeguard the Parks Community Centre'. The Hon. Mr Bannon also said on that occasion the only danger faced by the Parks was 'that it will continue to attract visitors from other areas, people who come to gape and admire'.

I strongly agree with what the Hon. John Bannon said in those remarks and, in fact, with other parliamentary colleagues at the rally a few weeks ago, on that Sunday morning, I actually said that instead of closing the Parks and downsizing services the government could make money out of the intellectual property and the concept if it were to develop this across the regions and then market it throughout Australia and indeed overseas. If you talk about real social inclusion and you mean what you talk about, then this is a model—an international model—of best practice. The then opposition leader, John Bannon, later told the other place on 9 December 1980:

It is no accident that the Parks Community Centre is established where it is. I remember seeing a survey some years ago in which people in Adelaide were required to list suburbs in descending order, from the most desirable to the least desirable, and about 120 suburbs were involved. Those suburbs which were at the bottom of the list, that is, those which were perceived (I might add this is a perception rather than reality—it was a citywide survey), were all of those suburbs [that] were centred around the Parks area, and this was a recognition of the tremendous social problems that had arisen in the area.

We are talking here of a significant number of catchment suburbs for the Parks, being Angle Park, Mansfield Park, Regency Park, Woodville Gardens, Athol Park, Wingfield and Ottoway. The Hon. John Bannon went on to state:

It was a dormitory suburb established very rapidly at the time of an acute housing shortage shortly after the war. Most of the houses were built by the Housing Trust on a standard duplex double unit model, which was cheap in all respects. It was not well designed, and the houses were not particularly well built either. They were built in a hurry to alleviate a crisis. Into that area were pushed all the people who were in desperate need of housing. Many of them had problems with employment, many of them with family and other social problems, and so on. One of the most notable features of the area was that it had absolutely no facility.

That is where the radical and brilliant social innovation of the Parks came in, and I applaud the Dunstan Labor government's initiative. It is truly, along with perhaps the Chaffey Theatre in Renmark, one of the Dunstan government's last legacies to South Australia. The Parks Community Centre now features a swimming pool, library, gymnasium, cinema, theatres and facilities for community assistance, woodwork and craft courses. There have, at times, been a health clinic and dental clinic at the centre also, and of course a school, which I will return to in a moment.

The Parks is also home to several government offices, including Housing SA, that operate out of the precinct and provide, amongst other services, food vouchers. English language classes and financial counselling are also offered from the site. There is a community legal centre there. The Parks has hosted a multicultural festival, family holiday crafts, plays, discount movies for families in school holidays, and kids' concerts. Both the soccer pitch and cricket oval are on the land, as well as a driver training and go-cart track, and extensive car parking and an electric model car racetrack. We found the venue excellent for staging a rally on 10 October, with great car parking and open space. Perhaps future community concerts and the like could be staged there.

It is an excellent community asset. Considerable numbers of gum trees that would arguably be significant trees are also on the site. For the sake of chronological order, I will put briefly on record that, due to problems with funding availability, the parliament in 1981 created the Parks Community Centre Act, which purely created the administrative structure of the board of the centre, its chief executive and a fund so that the Parks management had a legal and financial structure on which it could conduct its business. So, there is precedent for legislation specific to the Parks, even though that act was subsequently repealed.

You cannot retrace the Parks history without examining the now puzzling strategy of the Labor opposition in 1996 when the former government closed the Parks high school on the site. The Parks high school originally opened as the Parks community education centre, replacing the former Angle Park boys' and girls' technical colleges. Former premier Dunstan attended a rally at the Parks attacking the decision. Then a young-faced opposition leader launched a scathing attack on the government for considering shutting down anything at the Parks. I recall seeing the footage, I think from the ABC's archives, but there is some suggestion the then opposition leader and now Premier made strong commitments at that rally that his government stood forever behind the future of the Parks site, as indeed had one of his predecessors (Hon. John Bannon), as I have previously outlined.

I want to touch on the recent history of the Parks Community Centre under Labor. It is worth noting that, since it came to office in 2002, Labor has done virtually nothing to upgrade the Parks facility. They have, eight years later, in 2010, spoken about how it is ageing, crumbling and what-have-you. Whose responsibility was it over those eight years to maintain it? Having said that, the fact of the matter is that it still looks like a great structure and quite modern. It may need some painting and basic maintenance but it would be easy to get it back to excellent order.

I have on file a document called Parks Talk from November 2005 which has a picture including local members Hon. Jay Weatherill and Hon. John Rau previously looking at ways of improving the Parks. That is a good thing and good work for local members to be doing. In the Parks Talk newsletter in November 2005, heading towards the 2006 election, they said:

The South Australian government wants to get it right in the Parks. That is why we've been talking with many of you over the last few months. You've told us the Parks is a great place to live and you've also told us that certain things need to get better. Those of you who grew up here and worked and raised children in the area remember the days when people knew each other and looked out for their neighbours. The Parks Community Centre was a hub of community activity. Today we know we need to get unemployment down and improve community safety.

Then they said:

We have to make sure that the Westwood project is finished as soon as possible so that the people in the Parks can be confident about the future. At the top of our list of what we want to do in the Parks is the completion of the Westwood project. We now have an agreement with the developers, Urban Pacific, to speed up the project.

As I said, I give credit to the local members and congratulate others for engaging with the local community who are associated with the government or the direct community there. Cabinets are where the decisions are made, and at times, as with this government, there are a select few in cabinet who seem to really have the power to say whose community centre stays and whose community centre goes.

It must have been frustrating then for Monsignor Cappo that the 2010 razor gang, on which he sat (and perhaps the Monsignor was a lone voice of dissent on the Parks, having previously strongly supported the Parks), sadly recommended the bulldozing of the Parks. The recommendation of the Sustainable Budget Commission, this razor gang, to bulldoze the Parks was taken up, we are told, with unanimous support from cabinet, though one rumour did the rounds during the fallout of the backflip that I will outline later—a text message to Matt and Dave's 891 ABC radio morning program—that the Premier was the only one to have expressed concern on this issue. I would think that would probably be the case because, if there is one person who has a strong political sense in the cabinet it is the Premier.

They were happy to bulldoze the Parks, even though the bikie fortress across the road remains standing to this day. I thought when I was in parliament and they brought in the legislation with respect to the bikies that the fortress would have been the thing that the cabinet moved to knock down, not the Parks Community Centre.

The budget said that funding for the Parks would be cut by March 2011. This decision affects at least 30 full-time staff and 50 casual staff who have lived under a cloud of uncertainty over their contracts, and this uncertainty and angst is continuing to this day. I may have more to say on this in summing up, but there are still some very concerning rumours going around about the future of the pool, given its alleged concrete deterioration, and staff contracts. This government is good at divide and conquer, and this bill's protection for services is quite intentional to ensure that services are not siphoned off one by one.

I will touch on open space losses. I put in context that this Parks closure, as the government wanted in its budget, comes as the surrounding community area loses 8.1 hectares at Enfield High School, 11.3 hectares at Ross Smith, 3.6 hectares at Kilburn Primary and Ferryden Park Primary, respectively, and 3.24 hectares at Mansfield Park Primary—a total loss of open space in the western suburbs of 29.84 hectares. Add to that Cheltenham at 49 hectares and St Clair possibly also going into housing at 10.5 hectares, and you get a total of about 90 hectares.

Notwithstanding the loss of close to 90 hectares of open space in the inner north and northwest of Adelaide, this Labor government wanted to take away a further 14 hectares at the Parks. Their hunger for land development is amazing. We have nothing against land developers and we are not opposed to land development if it is done properly—we support it—but in the western suburbs, where we are already so much under pressure when it comes to open space, there has to be a halt somewhere so that people can actually enjoy lifestyle. Cheltenham reportedly sold for $85 million, so at 49 hectares that is a $1.7 million per hectare figure.

That is a rough calculation, I know, but by that rough measure this government stood to yield $23.8 million from selling The Parks, and the proceeds from all those schools, close to $50 million—short-sighted decisions for the sake of a budget bottom line, while community services suffer.

I want to talk about the Port Adelaide Enfield council and The Parks. It seems that, when it comes to funding sources, both the razor gang and the Rann government believe there is nothing special about The Parks and that it should be funded mostly, or entirely, by the council. It is a weak excuse to cut a community service.

I do not know whether this was a game of brinkmanship that went horribly wrong with the council, but it was perhaps what in sport terminology would be called a brain-fade moment. Channel 9 political reporter Tom Richardson, in his Independent Weekly column, described the decision as follows:

…perhaps the worst this Labor government has made in eight years of office. It was certainly among the nastiest.

Tom Richardson also said:

It shouldn't have to take Cappo's intervention, public rallies, earnest pleas, Facebook petitions or parliamentary inquiries for Labor to realise this was a dud decision.

Mayor Gary Johanson, who has been elected unopposed, has been excellent in fighting for the community. In the media and when speaking at the rally on the steps of Parliament House, he has been strongly opposed to the closure of The Parks.

I want to touch now on the subject of the backflip. By Twitter update to his 10,000-plus followers, many of whom seem to be from overseas or otherwise of dubious origin, the Premier stated on 5 October:

Reports that The Parks centre has already been sold are completely false. The Parks will NOT be closed.

The government followed that Twitter update with a press release by minister Rankine, dated Tuesday 5 October 2010 and headlined: Parks future assured: It will not close. How? Well, they had met with Mayor Johanson and put a process in the hands of Monsignor Cappo. I congratulate Monsignor Cappo on all the work he is doing but, boy, is he under some pressure with the amount of work the government has him actively pursuing.

Monsignor Cappo allegedly told the minister that he 'would like the future plan to be an integrated one that fits with the whole of the western region of metropolitan Adelaide'. That is good work by the monsignor, given the scores of hectares of open land and the schools in this region alone flogged off by this government.

However, despite what the media accepted pretty readily as a backflip, on the ground community members told me (and are still telling me today) that they remain sceptical. It is no surprise that they remain sceptical when you look at the rally on the steps of Parliament House today by country people, people who are very dear to me. They had the government's mark 1 country health plan, which would have decimated country health and cut 43 hospitals. Being a country person myself, I know the importance of these local hospitals.

With public pressure, the government backflipped on that plan and it came out with country health plan mark 2. In fact, the government said that there would be no closures and that there would be only improvements to public health in country South Australia. Well, of course, those people were at the rally today because of the broken promise contained in that press release. A closure is a closure if the government pulls Public Service contracts away from those hospitals by stealth and then forces the closure of those hospitals. That is why country people were out there rallying today. In other words, a press release, twitter or any media comment saying that something will never close is simply not good enough, and that is why they remain sceptical

Staff are in the dark. The caretaker period of the council is not helping. Hopefully, the timing of the announcement of the closure in the budget will be instructive to governments in the future. I have great sympathy for the staff and volunteers who have been hanging by a thread after this announcement, wondering whether their jobs and community functions will continue. This bill is about giving them that permanent certainty. This bill is about the major parties signalling their intentions, should they form government, beyond this current electoral cycle. This bill is about putting the stoppers on a future razor gang making the same foolish, number-crunching recommendation that it did this time around.

I turn to the structure of the bill. The Parks is zoned policy area 61 in the council's development plan, and that is a specific parks neighbourhood centre zone. Yet, as we know, major development status can override that. As we know with Cheltenham, special protections can be pulled away by this government very easily, so that is why we are proposing this legislative model today.

The initial inspiration comes from changes made to the Local Government Act—and this highlights the precedents—that gave special protection to seven parks, being Beaumont Common, Glenelg amusement park, Klemzig Memorial Garden, Levi Park in Walkerville, Reynella Oval, Lochiel Park and Frew Park in Mount Gambier. All of those, barring Lochiel Park, are specifically described as 'community land and the classification is irrevocable'. That was our starting point with this bill.

However, given community concern about continuity of services, and given the numerous ways any government could undermine the centre through cuts, we have also put provisions in this bill to say that services must not be cut without proper community consultation. Now, some may say you do not need to put that in a bill, but people are losing trust in this government. They talk about consultation, and we have seen their consultation. You could write or show their consultation on the back of a Mintie wrapper. There is virtually no consultation and we need to start to protect, in my opinion as a parliament, the best interests of our community.

Likewise, the government cannot get clever and lease out the Parks land to developers, or others, to get around the bill banning sale of the Parks land. Lastly, the Parks cannot be used for residential purposes, so we are absolutely clear that the Parks will remain as a community centre. Quite frankly, this is a 14-hectare beacon of open space and community services in an ocean of housing, where once there were 103 hectares of more open space and community buildings in this region of metropolitan Adelaide.

Family First supports the concept of TODs and urban infill, but you have got to have open space. If kids can't play, if communities and families can't get out and enjoy recreation, you are on a slippery slope to bad community environs.

I want to touch on petitions. I have here petitions that ran in the Messenger Press that have not been tabled, and I seek some advice from you, sir, and the Clerk, as to whether there is a way that I can include these in Hansard. Some 800 or more people signed this form of petition, which unfortunately could not be tabled as an official petition. I acknowledge the work of the Messenger Press. It was so concerned that it actually printed the petition in the newspaper, but obviously a commercial paper cannot leave the back page unprinted, so there was a technicality as to why it could not be tabled. So 800 more people signed the petition that has been tabled in the parliament.

I want to give credit to some other people who have been involved in this issue of saving the Parks. I pay tribute to the Weekly Times and the Portside Messengers, and indeed all of the News Limited press who have been vigilant on this issue for some time. The Weekly Times ran an article back on 24 February this year, by Michelle Etheridge, saying, 'Parks users were calling on their candidates to commit to saving the Parks'—bearing in mind that was before the election.

The Weekly Times noted in that article that the Parks had been receiving $2.1 million per annum, but in the 2009-10 budget had already suffered a 17 per cent cut in funding. So, when you look back, the government was already signalling that it was on the way to exit its responsibilities from this iconic Parks Community Centre.

I want to recount what our Family First candidate for Enfield, Brett Dewey, said in response to the pre-election question on the issue, as follows:

I have worked with youth in the area as well as in my own youth years doing Scout Shout performances at the Parks. Given the need of that community, it would not be in the community's best interests to shut down the Centre or even subdivide the land for other purposes. The Parks Community Centre is a pivotal pillar of the Parks' identity.

On that, one of the lines that the government has given is, 'Well, things have changed now. Former premiers, the Hon. Don Dunstan and the Hon. John Bannon, were right then about the importance of the Parks, but it has all changed, because with the Westwood development and all of the public housing that we are knocking down, we have a new community coming in there and they are not going to engage with the Parks Community Centre.' They are wrong. There are a lot of people who are generational in the western suburbs.

Those new people might take a little while to find out the benefits of the community centre, but they will need it, just as people needed it in the seventies and the eighties when the Labor government was showing good initiative and building this centre. The News Limited Press, through The Advertiser and the Sunday Mail, was consistently raising public awareness about this issue in recent months, to the point that they were running a public forum at the Parks in the week leading up to the community rally of 10 October, and they actually ended up pulling out after the government's backflip.

The Leon Byner program and the Bevan and Abraham program also pushed this issue very hard. I pay tribute to Sonya Feldhoff in her 891 ABC afternoon Drive program, who took a very keen interest in this issue from the beginning and reported on its progress a number of times. For instance, I recall speaking to the program on that afternoon of the government's backflip, at which time I committed to moving this bill.

As I said earlier, I give a lot of credit to the FIVEaa morning program of Leon Byner and his listeners. Leon, like Sonya, but even earlier in the piece, was like a dog with a bone on this issue. It was Leon Byner who interviewed Monsignor Cappo to get him to commit to action on this issue and, arguably, that set into collapse the deck of cards that was this brain fade of a budget decision. I believe Monsignor Cappo's strength helped immensely to see this backflip.

I want to honour the residents of St Clair and Cheltenham. It is sad for them that the government is saying that the Parks is safe but that their reserves are not. It is a tragedy of St Clair that that is at serious risk of housing and the Cheltenham residents that they have lost their battle to protect their open space, but I pay tribute to them because I believe their battles on open space in the west of Adelaide had an influence on public opinion and media interest when, yet again, this Labor government eyed off another public space in the western suburbs.

I know that the action groups on these issues sent messages of support to us and some attended the 10 October rally. Again, I pay tribute to Monsignor Cappo who, in late September, gave the government a good telling off about the Parks. Perhaps he had found the voice he could not raise on the razor gang—good on him. His comments, arguably, played one of the biggest roles in the decision being reversed. Our own supporters in the Parks area who got in touch with us about this issue and are users of the facility, to them I say: well done. You have been heard and you will continue to be heard on this issue.

I thank again those who spoke at the 10 October rally, being Isobel Redmond, Leader of the Opposition, the Hon. Tammy Franks of the Greens—I know that there were apologies on the day from the Hon. Ann Bressington, the Hon. John Darley and the Hon. Kelly Vincent due to other commitments—Mayor Gary Johansen, Peter Christopher of the PSA (you would be interested in this, Mr President; the union movement that you support so strongly actually came along to protest this decision) and representatives from this new phenomenon of the roller derby and from the seniors groups at the campus.

I deliberately left one person out of that thank you list for the rally because I want to conclude by acknowledging her excellent work: Lauren Francis and a very dedicated group of her friends and community volunteers, Bianca, Christine, Claire, Kelly, Mickey, and members of staff who I will not name for their employment safety but who were extremely helpful in fighting for their community and their concerns for the best interests of the community.

These are mums and dads, members of staff, community members and volunteers with great affection for their community centre. They worked incredibly hard circulating petitions, letterbox dropping, telephoning, organising, etc. Lauren herself started the Save Parks Community Centre Facebook group that at last count had 6,667 members, not a bad effort from the young lady. The group was the rallying point for the community's activity on this issue, and we had a remarkable rally on Tuesday 5 October on the steps of Parliament House that was as spontaneous as it was powerful.

The Facebook group started talking about having a rally and it happened, and it is a fantastic example of a community-driven campaign that brought a government to its knees. Perhaps the new film studio at Glenside could do a dramatisation of the whole episode! I must add that Lauren and her family are looking forward to the birth of her baby. She was so annoyed about the Parks that she put all that extra energy into getting that Facebook success. Congratulations to her.

In conclusion, this bill is about protecting the Parks for future generations. If it is good enough for six other metropolitan parks and community facilities, it is good enough for the Parks. We need to bear in mind how scarce the availability of open space and community facilities is in the western suburbs. If there has been a backflip—if, as the Premier said in front of the television cameras on Sunday 10 October that the Parks would 'never, ever close'—what does the government have to fear from this bill? It is time to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. I commend the bill to the council and look forward to its swift passage through this chamber and then into law.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. J.M. Gazzola.

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