15 July 2025
The Hon. R.A. SIMMS (11:52): I rise to speak in favour of the Statutes Amendment (Heritage) Bill. This bill will require the proposed demolition of state heritage places to be subject to full consultation and a public report from the SA Heritage Council, which will be tabled in the parliament. The SA Heritage Council will have a 10-week period to prepare the report to assess the heritage significance of a place.
The bill also requires the application for consent to or approval of demolition to be accompanied by the SA Heritage Council report. The Greens support these amendments to the Heritage Places Act and the Planning, Development and Infrastructure Act. I do see these as being an advancement on the status quo, and I welcome the government taking action in this regard. I will say that I do share some of the concerns, however, of the Hon. Michelle Lensink that this Labor government and, might I say, previous Labor governments do not have a good track record when it comes to heritage protection in South Australia. We have seen the way in which Labor has wilfully flouted heritage protection laws when it suits them.
We see the complete disregard that they have for national heritage protection laws. Indeed, this very parliament is protected under national heritage laws, yet they are salivating at the prospect of the Walker Corporation building a gargantuan tower overshadowing it and destroying that heritage value. Of course, the Thebarton barracks were protected under state heritage laws, but the Labor Party was very happy to swing the bulldozers into it, without regard for those heritage protections. So I welcome them taking action, but they do need to do more to demonstrate their bona fides in this regard.
The Greens believe that South Australia's natural and built cultural heritage is a precious asset and resource to be respected and protected for current and future generations. Unfortunately, a slow and steady stream of important architectural buildings are still being demolished or severely compromised here in Adelaide, despite planning protections and heritage listings. One of the recent egregious examples of this is, of course, the demolition of the Thebarton Police Barracks that I mentioned earlier. New laws were passed to get around heritage legislation first enacted in 1978 and updated in 1993. In the decades before we saw those laws introduced, many significant buildings were lost here in our state. Indeed, I think a lot of South Australians lament the loss of the public bars in the festival area that is now going to be turned into the plaything of developers, thanks to the Labor Party.
In 1962, the Theatre Royal on Hindley Street, which featured stars including Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, was replaced by a car park. In 1971, the South Australian Hotel, where the Beatles stayed in 1964 during their famous visit to Adelaide—I was far too young to have been around to witness that; others here may be more familiar with it—was demolished to make way for the construction of the Stamford hotel. The Brookman Building on Grenfell Street was knocked over in the late 1970s and replaced by the Grenfell Centre, also known as the 'Black Stump' because of its dark exterior. In 1986, Adelaide Steamship Company's distinctive building on Currie Street, complete with a ship's hull on its roof, went down for the RAA Tower, which until recently was known as Westpac House.
The Grand Central Hotel, on the corner of Pulteney and Rundle streets, hosted The Kinks and author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes series, and Mark Twain, who wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In 1976 it, too, was demolished in favour of another car park. Probably the most tragic loss was the demolition of the Jubilee Exhibition Building in 1887, built to celebrate the 50th anniversary of South Australia's founding and named in honour of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. That building was demolished in 1962 and replaced by the hideous Napier Building in Adelaide University. It is one of the more grotesque buildings in our city.
The most famous lost building would of course be the Aurora Hotel of 1859. That was demolished in 1983 and replaced by a heavy-set, low-rise office building. It was the fight to prevent the demolition of this building that spurred on the newly formed heritage fraternity to push for heritage surveys and heritage listings of important buildings in the city and, indeed, the rest of the state.
There is still an incremental loss of our built heritage buildings today. Some of it is overt and some of it is more subtle and disguised by clever marketing and other forms of justification. The Adelaide Oval redevelopment is, of course, a case in point. The greater future good seems to justify the demolition of most of the three heritage-listed grandstands. Curiously, they are still on the state register.
Generally, the demolition of heritage-listed buildings is due to pressure from developers and rising land values in the city and inner suburban areas. At this stage in Adelaide's development, it appears to be our government and the developers that have a major say in what is deemed important to our heritage. This bill we hope, from a Greens' perspective, will go some way to ameliorating the status quo and will give the public a greater say in planning decisions. The Greens believe the public has a right to genuine participation in planning decisions, including the right to access all relevant information, to participate in decision-making and to insist on all proper processes being followed.
I have pointed out some of the deficiencies in Labor's record when it comes to heritage protection, but I should also acknowledge one of the areas where we have collaborated with the Labor government during this term. It is in the area of demolition by neglect, and I welcome their support for my private member's bill which significantly increases the penalties for buildings that are falling into disrepair. I really thank the minister and her office for collaborating with the Greens on that issue. I think the bill that we are dealing with today is a positive step in the right direction in terms of adding further protections to some of our state's iconic buildings.