Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today with great pleasure to speak about a vital decision made by the good people of Mount Gambier over the weekend. That decision, of course, was to collect the Liberal candidate for Mount Gambier, Troy Bell, to the South Australian House of Assembly as their new representative in the state government.

I have been pleased to count Troy Bell as a hardworking member of the Liberal Party in the lower south-east, and now I am very proud to call him a state parliamentary colleague. His dedication to the state electorate of Mount Gambier over a long period up to the election, which included over 12 months of full-time campaigning, has at last paid dividends.

Voters in Mount Gambier wanted change. They voted for change and now, at least at a local level, they have change in the form of Troy Bell. Of course, the state-wide picture remains far less clear, even though the SA Liberals received some 53 per cent of the primary vote. Such are the quirks and oddities in the way that the South Australian electorates are drawn. They effectively deliver a modern-day gerrymander.

Those of us who have been around politics for a while never underestimated the ability of the ruthless SA Labor machine to sandbag a handful of critical city seats and possibly cling to power despite the state-wide swing against Labor and the clear mood for change.

It is safe to assume that the election campaign will almost always be tight in South Australia. Gaps in opinion polls invariably narrow in the approach to election day. The 2014 SA state election result was no different. Nevertheless, the message across the state seats that share territory with the federal electorate of Barker was clear. Now, for the first time since the state election in November 1997, Barker and the relevant state seats of Mount Gambier, MacKillop, Hammond and Chaffey are all blue.

There is a perception in some sections of the community that Barker and the state seats that lie within it are blue ribbon, and therefore safe. This, however, is absolutely not the case. Indeed, voters in all of the four aforementioned seats—Mount Gambier, MacKillop, Hammond and Chaffey—have seen fit to elect independent MPs at one stage or another in the past 16 years. As such, neither myself nor my state Liberal colleagues are even slightly complacent about the work we have to do constantly to gain and retain the trust of electors.

The modern electorate of Barker now also takes in Schubert, as it has done since the redistribution of 2004. Thankfully, Schubert has remained a Liberal seat throughout, and this has been in no small part due to the excellent work of a man I am pleased to call a friend and mentor, Mr Ivan Venning. On Saturday night, after a distinguished parliamentary career, which started in 1990, Mr Venning's time as an MP came to an end. On behalf of the good people of Schubert and, indeed, all rural and regional South Australians, I put on the record my thanks to Mr Venning. While the end of such a career is tinged with sadness, on a happier note the baton in Schubert has been handed over to my good friend Stephan Knoll. Although I am a few years older than Stephan, I would like to think that we are part of a new generation of regional Liberal MPs in South Australia. I am excited at the thought of working with him on behalf of the good people of the Barossa as well as the mid-Murray and northern Adelaide Hills, much of which he shares with me.

Another quirk of electoral boundaries in SA means that I share the wonderful Murray river township and surrounding districts of Morgan with the Liberal member for Stuart, Dan van Holst Pellekaan. The good people of Morgan are in the federal seat of Barker, which includes Cape Northumberland, which is South Australia's most southern tip, while also in the state seat of Stuart, which runs all the way to the Northern Territory and Queensland borders. Dan van Holst Pellekaan has a huge electorate to cover, and I commend him on being elected for a second term in SA parliament.

So while we wait for the final votes to be counted in a number of Adelaide seats it is wonderful that we recorded such an excellent result in my part of South Australia. I congratulate Adrian Pederick in Hammond, Mitch Williams in Mackillop, Tim Whetstone in Chaffey and look forward to continuing to work in harmony with them for our shared constituencies. And for Troy Bell and Stephan Knoll, congratulations on wonderful results. I wish you long and successful parliamentary careers and know I will enjoy having such energetic and effective community representatives working alongside me in Barker.