Giles Electorate

Mr HUGHES (Giles) (15:17): I rise today to talk about a number of issues in the electorate of Giles, especially the interesting reaction today to comments that the Mayor of Kimba, Dean Johnson, made in his letter of resignation about why he was resigning from the HAC. I find it very disturbing that somebody opposite labelled Dean Johnson as a 'Labor stooge'. I think you might find that Dean Johnson is a member of the Liberal Party.

He has been a very good mayor of Kimba for a number of years now. In all my dealings with Dean Johnson, I have always found him very professional. He has a lot of integrity and, like a lot of mayors of small communities, he really cares for his community. To be dismissed in that way, I think is pretty shabby because what he was doing was raising important issues. One of those issues is about the capacity for some of our smaller communities, when it comes to health services, to be listened to and then the perennial problem—and it is a perennial problem—of getting GPs to come and service communities such as Kimba, on Eyre Peninsula, and Cowell, in the Franklin Harbour area.

Both Franklin Harbour and Kimba have struggled when it comes to getting GPs. The Mayor of Kimba has been very frustrated about that. Pressure is put on local councils in those areas to try to fill the gap. Obviously, the mayor was very frustrated that he had written to the Minister for Health in the other house and did not get a response. The man is not a Labor stooge: he is a man who takes his commitments and obligations to the community of Kimba very seriously.

It is worth reflecting on the lack of GPs in those communities, especially given the challenges they are going through at the moment. Parts of Eyre Peninsula are experiencing incredibly adverse health conditions. Just recently, I was down at Franklin Harbour and met with a number of farmers. They expressed their serious concerns about what was going on. Some farmers have come to my office in Whyalla, too, to express a degree of desperation when it comes to the plight they are facing.

There was one farmer with a connection to Whyalla. It was at Westies. We were having a few beers on raffle ticket night—I won third prize, but I had to donate it back—and I had a long conversation with one of the farmers of Eyre Peninsula near Cowell. He was a third generation farmer. He said that, in his experience, this has been the worst he has ever seen. The thing about drought in South Australia is that there are a lot of areas that are doing well. Some areas are below average and will get through, but some parts of the state, and certainly some parts of Eyre Peninsula, are doing it incredibly hard.

I call upon the minister, when it comes to the Regional Growth Fund, to give those communities experiencing difficulties some priority when it comes to the allocation of money from that fund. When we were in government and there were a whole bunch of contractors going to the wall in Whyalla because of their company moving into administration, we used some of the money from the regional development fund to do the best we could for those contractors. It represented, at the time, incredibly tangible and worthwhile assistance. We need to look at the use of that fund to assist some of our farming communities in the state that are going through an incredibly difficult time.