James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Earlier today, I had the pleasure to reflect on the opening of the Australian Space Agency last Wednesday in Adelaide. I want to take the opportunity in the adjournment debate to add to those comments and talk about the precinct more broadly, which the Australian government is investing in as part of our city deal with the South Australian government and the Adelaide city council, known as Lot Fourteen on North Terrace. This is the former site of the Royal Adelaide Hospital. Given the new hospital was built and opened in 2017, we were left with a situation where we had an old building on a site, a precinct, nestled within the Adelaide Park Lands and it was not really apparent what we could do with it. Almost two years ago the South Australian state government came up with the concept of turning it into a new innovation precinct, known as Lot Fourteen. Lot Fourteen is the name that was given to that parcel of land by Colonel Light, a very famous Englishman that designed Adelaide city in the 1830s.

Apart from being the home of the Australian Space Agency, Lot Fourteen has a number of other really exciting new engine rooms for growth in our economy and for future jobs. Last Monday, I was able to join many esteemed dignitaries from the Adelaide University, Lockheed Martin and the state government—I was representing the federal government—at the opening of the Australian Institute for Machine Learning. This is a collaboration between Adelaide University and Lockheed Martin, the major defence prime, also with support from government. There are some fascinating projects they're undertaking on behalf of governments as part of the funding commitment being made.

One project that I thought was really interesting and exciting is that they're bringing in live feed footage from all of the major intersections in the Adelaide CBD to monitor the flow of traffic. Of course, through the principle of machine learning, through developing algorithms and through the process of those algorithms talking to each other and teaching each other, effectively, we'll hopefully have an outcome where the traffic-light sequencing through the CBD can be run not just on the old-school '90 seconds here, 60 seconds there' but through an optimisation of the perfect amount of time that we need one light to be green, then the next one to go green to support traffic flow through the CBD of Adelaide. Like any CBD, it's the most significant area from a traffic congestion point of view. That's machine learning; that's happening on site at Lot Fourteen. We've got the five heritage buildings there that have been slowly refurbished, one after the other. There's one to go, the Bice Building. The McEwan Building is where the Space Agency was opened by the Prime Minister last Wednesday. We've got the allied health building, where Stone & Chalk are now managing I think 200 workstations for co-collaboration and startup concepts. They're all looked after and curated by Stone &Chalk.

The precinct has so many more exciting things to come. We'll have a new culinary school, relocating the Regency Park facility. It's a great facility, but it is towards 40 years old now, and the future is people being in the CBD, learning in the CBD, and then doing their on-the-job training in hospitality, particularly restaurant and catering, in nearby businesses. That's very exciting. Of course, we've got the Aboriginal art and cultures gallery, which is a major part of the city deal funding that the Commonwealth is contributing, to have an iconic cultural institution added to North Terrace in Adelaide. We intend for that to be the largest collection in the world of Aboriginal art, artefacts and various representations of Indigenous cultures. That's really exciting.

It's a great opportunity. We didn't know what we were going to do with that precinct. Old hospitals tend to be demolished, and this was an opportunity to be a bit creative about what we would do with the heritage buildings in particular, while still creating room in the precinct for new build. Instead of what Labor wanted to do, which was effectively turn it into some kind of housing development, we've turned it into a great asset not only for future jobs and our economy but for everyone in the city of Adelaide and the state of South Australia. I'm very excited about what's in store for that precinct, and I look forward to keeping the House up to date, into the future, as more great milestones come online as we roll out this great collaboration between state, local and federal government.