Thomas Playford

Appendix Two: The State Bank Model for a Public Housing Developer, Australian Alert, the first of May 2024.

Appendix Three: What the Government Can Do Right Now to Help You Keep or Buy a Home, South Australia's Thomas Playford, A Model for Non-Ideological Conservatives, Australian Alert, the eighteenth of February 2026.

Governments were warned.

They didn't listen.

But Dunstan wasn't arguing against South Australia's public housing system.

In fact, by the time he'd entered Parliament, the South Australian Housing Trust was already helping to transform the state, and much of that story belonged to another premier, Sir Thomas Playford.

Professor John Williams has spent years studying South Australia's political and legal history.

It was a Playford story, but it was a continuing, the idea of the Housing Trust and what does it mean, the idea that we have public housing.

People used to come and look at South Australia, and I'm, I'm hoping they're starting to do it again.

Under Playford, the Housing Trust became one of the engines of South Australia's economic transformation.

Affordable homes helped attract workers.

Workers helped attract industry.

And those types of businesses were sort of part of families, weren't they? And communities as much as, of course, the nation-building element.

Sure, but really fascinating, I think, for the role that Liberal Premier Thomas Playford had in the so-called Playford Plan, which was actually William Wainwright's plan, but it became synonymous with Playford, of building Elizabeth as a satellite city and attracting a whole bunch of manufacturing firms to set up operations in Elizabeth and undercut factories in Victoria around in New South Wales because of cheaper wages and the provision of public housing.

He was, I think, the longest-serving Premier in Australia, certainly in South Australia, for a reason.

He was incredible at serving the interests of the South Australian people and, of course, making sure that the electorates were arranged in such a way that he was resoundingly re-elected time and time again with his playmandering system.

And I'm watching the, uh, thing, and the, the play matter that was playing out was, outraged me.

And I particularly remember Tom Playford defending it by saying, "What is the Labor Party talking about? The Labor Party holds the seat of Enfield, which is the largest seat in the state, 40,000 voters, and the smallest seat, the seat of Frome, 4,000 voters." And I kid you not, that was the difference in size between the largest electorate and the smallest.

Labor did actually coincidentally hold both.

But there was a lot of others in between they didn't hold, and this outraged my sense of fairness.

Yeah, look, if the market had been left to its senses itself, there would never have been a steelworks there.

It was only put there because Sir Thomas Playford, the South Australian Premier, insisted in 1958 that BHP build it.

Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to keep on mining in the middle back ranges.

it's a long way away from the end users and the sort of populated areas, most populated areas of Australia.

afieldFor tonight we open the first part of a festival centre complex which will be significant not only in Australia, but in world terms.

Around the world for some time they have said that what we have here now could not be built, and people are now saying around the world, "How did it happen in Adelaide?" Well, it happened in Adelaide because of our people, and I want to pay tribute to everybody who has been involved in this development, and particularly to previous governments, those of Sir Thomas Playford and of Mr Hall, who were both involved in vital decisions about the building of a festival centre and in choosing this site.

People weren't just asking what was happening in South Australia, some wanted to be a part of it.

We were optimistic, and one of the exciting things was that the state had become a magnet.