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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-03-05 Daily Xml
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Coronavirus

The Hon. T.T. NGO (15:06): Supplementary arising from the answer: the minister mentioned there will be a significant impact on our economy. Does the government have any contingency plans to support the industry?

The Hon. D.W. RIDGWAY (Minister for Trade and Investment) (15:07): I thank the honourable member for his supplementary. I updated the chamber yesterday and we are certainly working closely with the universities. The Premier has certainly done a video, and the Consul-General has done a video letting everybody know that we are open for business for all international students and, in particular, Chinese students, but really it is a matter to deal with all of the actual health impacts, which my colleague the Hon. Stephen Wade and his team are doing, and so we are supporting them in every way we can.

We are making sure the universities—which have said they are well in touch with all of their students. StudyAdelaide, ably led by Karyn Kent, are coordinating if we have a large number of students come back in a block and they need to have 14 days of isolation, how we manage that, and they are coordinating that because it won't be easy to provide these students with the isolation, the regular monitoring, the check-up every morning that they are okay, plus all the food and supplies they need. That is quite a logistics undertaking and StudyAdelaide have been tasked with doing that, so we are doing all we can at the moment to assist this sector but we really need to just wait and see at what stage they come back to South Australia.

I was only speaking to the Vice-Chancellor of Adelaide University this morning around the impact and he said, 'Look, it will be quite significant.' They are uncertain of the magnitude of the impact because, of course, there are students coming back in different ways, like I mentioned the young gentleman I met last week who had come back through Thailand. So there are still some coming, we are uncertain of the impact but we are certainly working closely with the sector to minimise that impact.

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