Government Advertising

Mr KNOLL (Schubert) (15:15): I rise today to talk about the government advertising campaign for Transforming Health. Transforming Health advertising has been a subject in this place and a subject of much speculation out in the broader community. Indeed, the Auditor-General has brought down a report in relation to government advertising campaigns having a slightly political nature. I have recently come across concerns raised by the Premier's own Communications Advisory Group when it comes to the Transforming Health ad campaigns and their various stages, and they raise a number of concerns that need to be aired.

The first thing they talk about is the relationship between the Transforming Health campaign and the federal budget cuts campaign, a campaign that was shown by the Auditor-General to have political connotations and, certainly, a reasonable person may consider that advertising to be of a political nature. It is interesting why they would be discussing the relationship between Transforming Health and the federal budget cuts campaign. Indeed, I believe that they are discussing the political nature of the Transforming Health campaign and, indeed, they wanted to make sure that the advertising schedules for the two campaigns did not coincide.

They then go on to talk about some mundane process oriented issues with the campaign. The first is that the campaigns did not have an explicit enough call to action, also that the campaigns had a lack of focus on the benefits to the citizen, the value for money and risk of perception to the community of having four separate mail-outs and the fact that the benchmarks were set really low. It was noted that the campaign overachieved, but it overachieved because the benchmarks were set so low that they could achieve it. That was an issue for the Premier's Communications Advisory Group.

There was a lack of internal messaging and staff could have been utilised as champions for the message. There was a lack of community focus and a lack of thanks to the community for contributing. Those sorts of issues with the practicalities of the campaign surely highlight that this was not a good use of taxpayer funds; indeed, that this was a campaign that was not well thought through and was not well executed and had a whole raft of issues. Certainly, from my reading of the work of the Premier's Communications Advisory Group, this was the campaign that came in for most scrutiny and had the most number of issues.

The real crux of the issue that I have found is in relation to the second phase of the campaign. The second phase of the campaign was, according to documents, that SA Health advised that 'recent developments in the health reforms have led to the necessity to commence a second phase of the campaign'. This was not originally envisaged, but it came as a result of community acceptance at that point in time. That basically says to me that the Transforming Health reforms were not going down well. I imagine that at any time you try to cut hospital bed numbers in a community these things are not going to do well. SA Health came back and realised that they needed to ramp up the ad spend to try to change community perceptions.

The reason this is quite interesting and where I find that there are some real issues with this campaign is that PCAG (Premier's Communications Advisory Group) questioned the use of the wording 'media misinterpretation' and how it is not the right language to be using in the submission. 'SA Health noted this.' The submission they were talking about is the submission that SA Health put to PCAG, which sits within Department of the Premier and Cabinet in relation to phase 2 of the campaign.

What PCAG is essentially saying there is, 'Just because the media did not take your point of view in relation to the reforms is not a good enough excuse for ramping up the ad campaign.' They are basically saying that this campaign was taking on a political nature and was purely trying to change public perception around a series of very difficult reforms about cutting into health expenditure.

Also, it is recognition that, no matter how hard you try to ram these changes down people's throats, no amount of advertising is going to be able to cover off on that, and people are going to see them for what they are. This is a case where one government department is belling the cat on another government department, and it is a very clear indication that the community sees these health reforms as nothing more than cuts to our health system.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member's time has expired.