ROYAL ADELAIDE HOSPITAL

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH (Waite) (14:41): My question is again to the Minister for Health. Is the minister certain that there has not been any mixing of high-level contaminated soil removed from the rail yards RAH site with lower level contaminated soil or clean fill, either at the RAH site or off site, so as to conceal or mask the level of contamination, and is checking against this prospect a responsibility of the environmental auditor employed by the consortia, the EPA or others?

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Ageing, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Arts) (14:42): The conspiracy theory is kind of being promoted here by the member for Waite. What I can tell the house is this, and I have consulted with my colleague here, the minister for the environment, who knows how these things work better than I.

An honourable member: You're a former minister for the environment.

The Hon. J.D. HILL: I am, indeed—as were you, so you should know.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. J.D. HILL: I am deferring to my colleague who currently holds the brief. What I was going to say was that, in the process of removing contamination from the site, it is a bit like a surgical procedure, I suppose, of a doctor or surgeon removing a cancer from the body. They take out the cancer, but they also take out flesh from around it so they make sure they have captured all of the body which is potentially toxic, and that is precisely what happened in the RAH site. So, there was—

Members interjecting:

The Hon. J.D. HILL: I cannot understand why they bother asking a question, then mock and groan as they get the truth. The reality is that they find an element of pollutants, of something which needs to be removed. They make sure they take that, and part of the process of taking that is to take a selection of material from around it which is of a lower level of pollution; that is just the way it happens. The question you asked is whether they mixed up on-site highly polluted with lower polluted. Well, yes, as a matter of course of removing it those two elements are then co-joined and transferred from the site, but that is the nature of how they clean up the site.

It is not just on the RAH site, it is on every other site. I have just had some advice that the same process was used at the SAHMRI site and was completed using the same sort of standard, the same sort of process and, in fact, it came in under budget. So, the process that is going on in relation to the new RAH is absolutely appropriate. The difference is that it is being run through a PPP arrangement, so it is not the government that is in control of the day-to-day operations other than through the supervisory role of the EPA, but it is the PPP partner and its own contractors that are running it, and they are doing it absolutely appropriately with proper supervision.