by Shane Sody
Your Adelaide Park Lands will be protected only when a sufficient number of people DEMAND that they are protected.
That’s what we believe at the Adelaide Park Lands Association. That belief is explicitly written into our Strategic Plan. It drives everything we do. It’s why we keep on with our four-pronged strategy; our four streams of activities: Explore, Inspire, Protect, Restore. These activities underpin and strengthen our simple message: “Love Your Park Lands”.
Your Park Lands are (or should be) “Open, Green, Public”. That’s what we stand for: what we work to support.
We believe that when enough South Australians come to appreciate this world-unique resource garlanding Adelaide, then your massed voices will finally get through even to those politicians, like the re-elected Malinauskas Labor State Government, especially those who habitually see your Park Lands as vacant building sites.
In the State election, of 21 March 2026, we recommended voting for The Greens (and/or outgoing MLC Tammy Franks) in State-wide contests. In the electorate of Adelaide, we recommended voting for community independent Keiran Snape.
The result did not meet our hopes, but it did reflect a massive increase in support for your Park Lands, compared to 2022. The Greens achieved their highest-ever State-wide vote, and in the electorate of Adelaide, the vote for pro-Park Lands candidates rose from 13.5% in 2022 to 23.6% in 2026 (which was the combined vote for Community independent Keiran Snape and the Greens’ Bronte Colmer).
This reflects similar growth in support for your Park Lands over the past four years, as measured by:
our growing membership base,
our booming social media following, especially on Facebook;
subscriptions to our newsletter ‘Open, Green, Public’ and
visits to this website.
If this measurable support for your Park Lands grows over the next four years, to the extent that it has grown over the past four years, then more and more politicians from various parties will gradually realise it’s in their own interests to look at long-ignored measures to heritage-list, protect, promote, and even restore this unique treasure.
If Premier Peter Malinauskas fails to read the room, and over the next four years continues with multiple attacks on your Park Lands (as his Government has done in the past four years) then it’s plainly foreseeable that Park Lands support would continue to swell, with future consequences for Labor at the ballot box.
But we would much rather take a positive position. We’ll be encouraging the State Government to re-think its attitude to your Park Lands.
We will keep advocating to the State Government that it should read the room, and start treating your Park Lands as the treasure that they are; worthy of full protection, and both State and World Heritage listing.
What can you do? Simple.
