Question Time

Coronavirus, Nurse Employment

Mr MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Leader of the Opposition) (14:11): My question is to the Premier. Does the Premier agree that a front-line nurse should not be left financially worse off as a result of contracting COVID-19 through their service to our community?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:11): I'm not 100 per cent sure what the Leader of the Opposition is alluding to, but can I just say we're very grateful to all of our public servants in South Australia, especially those people who are on the front line: our nurses, our doctors, the people who work within our hospital situations here in South Australia and of course in the many dozens of rapid testing and assessment clinics we have now set up across the state for rapid testing and assessment of COVID-19.

I would also take this opportunity to thank all of the other public servants who have been intimately involved, especially those in the broader SA Health Communicable Disease Control Branch, the public health administration, and also our teachers, who are this week coping with an enormous task to essentially set up a new mode of teaching.

They have been mainly teaching in a classroom scenario; now, from the start of term 2, they will be having a bimodal arrangement in terms of teaching, with certain students in schools and certain students learning from home. I want to thank the department and the teachers for the great work that they have been doing in preparing all of those resources—both hard copy and online resources—so that students who are studying from home will have access to them.

Finally, can I just thank the police in South Australia. The police commissioner is acting as the State Coordinator during this major emergency declaration. They are unequivocally on the front line in South Australia and doing an outstanding job. We want to make sure that all of our front-line workers—all of our workers in South Australia—have the highest level of protection as we take on this global pandemic.

We have seen some of the harrowing images from overseas of people on the front line having to cope with the impacts of this disease. We're doing our very best in South Australia to make sure that we avoid anything like what we have seen overseas. To be quite honest, at the moment the trajectory is heading in the right direction, so I am very grateful for that.