Country Health SA

Mr PENGILLY (Finniss) (15:33): I wish today to raise some matters relating to Country Health SA. I indicated a couple of weeks ago in this place that I would have more to say. I would particularly like to talk about Transforming Health and how the axe is about to fall on contract employees of South Australia's Country Health.

This is information that has been given to me from within the department, and it is most alarming. I am informed that some time in March, contract employees of Country Health are going to be told that, when their contracts expire, they will no longer be employed. This is going to have a devastating effect in my area, but more particularly across the state. I ask the minister to perhaps pick up the phone and talk to me about this in due course. It is alarming, what might happen.

I have two health services. I have the South Coast health service and associated hospital at Victor Harbor, and I have the Kangaroo Island Health Service and hospital in Kingscote. These are major employers in both areas. The contract staff are, I believe, unaware that this axe is going to fall. If it is incorrect, I believe the minister should come into this place to say so immediately. If it is true, then members of parliament outside of suburban Adelaide who have health services in their areas need to be most concerned about what is going to take place. There are some other matters about the South Coast hospital that I wish to raise in due course.

One of the matters that is of major concern at the moment is that people with private health cover who are being admitted to the public hospital at South Coast are not being transferred to the private hospital after their assessment. They are being kept in the public hospital against their wishes. It is simply not good enough that, if they are paying private health cover, they are not being admitted to the private hospital, which runs separately to the public hospital but under the same roof with its own board and, I might add, a board of directors that knows what is going on rather than the government's health advisory councils, who simply get told what the government wants them to know and regrettably, with the best intent in the world, have no control over the operations of those units.

I think there is something shonky going on there. They are trying to justify the existence of the public hospital by keeping private patients there who want to go into the private hospital and want their private health care. The minister needs to think about where that is going. I do not think enough thought has gone into that. I do not know whether it is a directive from the local administrative side of the hospital or whether it is from the regional director, Debbie Martin, but it is not good enough. I have named bureaucrats in this place before and I will name them again, because it simply needs to be said from time to time. That matter on Transforming Health and how it relates to contract employees under Country Health in South Australia needs some explanation, and I would certainly like some assurance sooner rather than later.

The other issue that I will speak about concerns some comments attested to Mr Richard Zachariah on radio FIVEaa last Sunday week, which I thought were demeaning and highly insulting to the residents of Victor Harbor. Mr Zachariah, certainly in decades past, has been well known. He resides, I believe, in Woodside now. He has not done his homework. He does not understand the way things tick. He does not understand that there are more than about 6,000 or 7,000 people in Victor Harbor—there are 14,000 plus—and he is at serious variance with what the majority of the community want down there. I guess he is getting paid for what he is saying, but he is wrong, wrong, wrong.