Health Budget

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (14:48): My question is for the Minister for Health. Given that the budgeted funding for the Department for Health and Ageing in the 2015-16 financial year is less than the estimated expenditure for 2014-15, why did the government breach its commitment to continue to increase health funding year on year?

The Hon. J.J. SNELLING (Playford—Minister for Health, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Health Industries) (14:49): The way health is funded, a large proportion of our funding is on an activity basis. The more presentations we have, the more we get funded, because we need to open up more beds and we need to staff those beds with doctors and nurses.

Last year was a very bad year. We had a lot of presentations with the worst flu season on record, and we had to significantly flex up the capacity of our hospitals and that meant we needed to employ more doctors and more nurses and open more hospital beds to deal with the enormous number of presentations we had.

Now Treasury and the budget make forecasts every year about what we expect, and we do not expect and we hope and pray that we do not get another bad flu season as we did last year. But what there can be no doubt of is that, if we do have as bad a year as last year, then we will receive the funding to enable us to staff our hospitals accordingly to open up the hospital beds we need. This is essentially a forecast based upon what we expect activity levels are going to be. We do not expect activity levels to be as high as last year because we don't expect that we would get two years in a row the worst flu seasons on record.

I should also point out that part of the reductions, particularly with regard to FTE numbers in the department, are because of either expiring and not being renewed or national partnership agreements with the commonwealth or, indeed, national partnership agreements which have just been defunded from 1 July. There are about 200 FTEs in the Department of Health whose employment will cease because the commonwealth has ceased to provide funding for those positions.

As well as that, the chief executive has previously announced some significant reductions to head office staff so there will be some reductions of, from memory, 100 to 200 FTEs in head office that will go from the Department of Health.