Speeches
Tuesday, 06 August 2024
Festival Tower Official Opening
Thank you Jack for your welcome to country.
I am pleased to join everyone for the official opening of Festival Tower.
This evening marks an important opportunity for project partners, tenants and industry friends to recognise the hard work undertaken by multiple parties, to celebrate the completion of Walker Corporations’s first commercial tower in Adelaide and the realisation of Lang Walker’s vision.
Earlier this year I had the pleasure of speaking at the launch of the Flinders University vertical campus, and Rod and I were over again last week for a campus visit with the Vice-Chancellor.
We have been extremely impressed by the tower’s facilities – not to mention spectacular views!
A significant consideration for Flinders city campus students – a high proportion of whom live in the north-eastern and north-western suburbs – is their commute time. Flinders at Bedford Park is simply too far away for these students, but they are loving studying here, and perhaps one day they will work here as well.
Flinders Tower has been a welcoming neighbour to Rod and me across the road at Government House, and like good neighbours, we’d like to reciprocate.
We’d be pleased to see Flinders students, and in fact all Festival Tower tenants, at our monthly lunch on the lawns event on the first Friday of every month during Spring, Summer and Autumn.
Bring your picnic rug, lunch and enjoy some music from local bands and orchestras in our grounds – we look forward to seeing you there.
Friends,
I thank the Walker Corporation and its partners for bringing to life the Festival Tower, for the benefit of our state and its people.
It’s a stunning, 21st century building, located on the ancient lands of the Kaurna people.
In the grand lobbies of the tower are two paintings, by First Nations artist Zaachariaha Fielding, of special ceremonial sites in the APY Lands.
I am pleased to see this marriage of ancient and modern represented in the tower.
Every day, South Australians enter the Festival Tower to work, to learn, to dream, to inspire and be inspired.
I wish them, and the Walker Corporation, all the very best in what is becoming one of the most desirable neighbourhoods in Adelaide.