Royal Adelaide Hospital

Mr MARSHALL (Dunstan—Leader of the Opposition) (14:21): Thank you very much. My question is to the Minister for Health. Is the government satisfied that workers on the new Royal Adelaide Hospital site are safe and that the project time frame is not leading to an undermining of workers' safety?

The Hon. J.J. SNELLING (Playford—Minister for Health, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Health Industries) (14:22): I am glad that the Leader of the Opposition asked this question. The first thing I should say is that this terrible accident is being investigated by SafeWork SA, and I have full confidence, and the government does, that it will get to the bottom of how this accident happened and what may have been the factors around it happening.

I know that it will take the appropriate action if some culpability or negligence is found as a result of this. Now, with regard to the timetables for completion of the project, I do not think I could have made myself clearer before this terrible accident happened; as recently as a couple of weeks ago, when asked whether I could guarantee that the hospital would not be delayed, I said, 'No, I won't guarantee it.'

My overriding concern and that of the government has always been the safety of patients and, of course, the safety of workers working on the site, and we have always made very, very clear that we expect the builder to provide a safe workplace. Now, if the builder is having difficulty meeting the deadlines and then the time lines associated with the project in a way that is safe for the people working on that site, we expect them to come to us and speak to the government about their inability to meet the deadlines.

There is only one person in South Australia who has been saying something different, and that person has been saying that the government has not been hard enough on the builder, that we should have gone in harder, in fact that our penalties were nowhere near strong enough against the builder for lateness, and that person was the Hon. Rob Lucas, who had quite explicitly said that we should be fining the company for being late.

We have not taken that approach. We have always been quite open to sit down with the company and to negotiate a revised time line, because from my perspective both the safety of the patients who we need to transfer into the new hospital—which is going to be a project of extreme complexity—and the safety of the workers who are working on the most ambitious infrastructure site undertaken in South Australia's history and one of the largest in our nation's history, has to be absolute paramount. We certainly won't be pushing the builder to meet some political deadline in a way that would compromise either of those things.

The SPEAKER: Leader.