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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-11-01 Daily Xml
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The Hon. N.J. CENTOFANTI (Leader of the Opposition) (14:32): Supplementary question: what are the minister and the South Australian government doing to improve those labour shortages?

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order! Excuse me, you don't have to respond to the whip, right? Listen to the minister.

The Hon. C.M. SCRIVEN (Minister for Primary Industries and Regional Development, Minister for Forest Industries) (14:32): I thank the honourable member for her supplementary question. Knowing that labour shortages are such an issue across all our regions, indeed even in our cities, the Malinauskas Labor government has been working on a number of programs to assist with that.

One of those is, in partnership with the federal government, to have fee-free places in agricultural courses, among others, which is of importance. We will also be investing more in our education system overall and, in particular, looking at how we can better support teachers in regional areas—for example, making permanent the retention allowance for teachers is part of that.

Secondly is looking at regional housing, an area that has been ignored. I was very, very pleased to be in Bordertown last week with the Premier and the Minister for Housing from the other chamber to be announcing a housing program. We know that in Bordertown there has been pretty much nil rental availability, and so through a partnership agreement with the Tatiara District Council we are going to be building additional dwellings and we were able to be there on the site of that.

Bordertown of course has a meatworks, as does Naracoorte, and finding staff for those two processing facilities without housing for those staff is, of course, particularly challenging, so I am very pleased this is one more initiative from our government that will go some way, step by step, to addressing the labour shortage issues.

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