Motions

Coronavirus, Public Health System

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (11:33): I move my revised motion:

That this house—

(a) expresses its appreciation to the talented doctors, nurses, paramedics and other health practitioners and staff for their work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic;

(b) recognises that the public health and hospital system is a critical factor in the protection for South Australians and that system should always be well resourced and funded;

(c) calls on the government to do everything possible to provide protections, such as personal protective equipment, to these hardworking health staff through the pandemic; and

(d) calls on the government to provide all necessary resources to our public hospitals to look after all patients in a timely and effective manner during this pandemic and forever more.

Never before has the public health system been more important. Never before have our public hospitals been more important. We should be very proud that here in South Australia and in Australia we have public hospitals, we have a Medicare system, we have the ability for people to get care no matter what their income, and we have hardworking health professionals who work day in, day out within that system, dedicated to care for South Australians when they are ill.

We have seen the COVID-19 pandemic reach around the world. We have seen this pandemic, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere, causing untold numbers of deaths, damage and many illnesses, and sadly the worst is probably yet to come.

Thank goodness so far in South Australia, and in Australia broadly, we have avoided what is happening in the US and the UK at the moment, but it is absolutely important that we are prepared for that. The first line of that preparation is having in place a strong public hospital system, a strong public health system, and having those front-line doctors, nurses, paramedics, allied health professionals and all the other health staff who are absolutely essential, whether they be clerks, cleaners, catering staff or security. All those people who work in our hospital system are absolutely essential, so it is important today that we as a house pay tribute to them and say thanks to them for their hard work.

They have been busy over the past few months preparing themselves for what may hit our state and what still may hit our state in terms of a significant number of COVID-19 cases that they would have to deal with. They are seeing what is happening around the world. They are seeing the impact upon health professionals in the US, the UK, Italy and Spain—the number of health workers who have been infected and the number of doctors and nurses and other health workers who have died because of the infections that they have obtained while caring for COVID-19 cases—yet despite that, they show up to work. Despite that, they are busy preparing, and despite that, if this does hit our state, they will be working hard to prepare and care for South Australians who need care.

What they expect is for us to back them. They expect us in this parliament and us in the community and us in the government broadly to do our part to make sure that they have the resources that they need, that they have the protections that they need, that they have everything possible that they could need in place. One of the major elements of that that we are seeing around the world is the issue of personal protection equipment (PPE). This is a significant issue.

I think one of the great benefits of the fact that we are not seeing a significant number of cases—and particularly here in South Australia it has been a week since our last case—is that we have the ability now to put in place those measures. If this peak had happened a long time before, I think it is fair to say that we would not have had all those measures in place. We need to make sure that they are in place. We need to make sure that all of those health workers have the protections that they need, because it is not just the people who are looking after people who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 who need protection; it is everybody else who might be dealing with somebody who is potentially a carrier of COVID-19 who needs protection in our health system.

If we have people throughout the winter appearing in our emergency departments with respiratory issues, as they invariably do, there is no way of knowing when they come in the front door of the emergency department whether they are going to have COVID-19 or not. Everybody must be prepared. It means an entirely different way of operating than those health staff are used to. Health staff—doctors, nurses and other workers—are used to rushing in and getting to work straightaway.

The saying goes that there is no emergency in a pandemic. They need to look after themselves first. They need to make sure that their PPE is in place before they attend to the patient, otherwise they are putting themselves, their colleagues and their loved ones at risk through potential infection to them. That is the top line issue that we need to make sure that we have in place here in South Australia.

We also need to make sure that adequate training is happening. We need to make sure, particularly as we have seen a step-down in elective surgery over the past three or four weeks, and it is still only operating at about 25 per cent, that we are doing as much training as possible and we are upskilling our workforce as much as possible to prepare for what might be coming.

We are lucky in terms of a lot of the investments that have been made previously. If you look down the road here, we have probably the best hospital equipped to deal with COVID-19 in Australia—the Royal Adelaide Hospital. One reason for that is that it is an entirely single-roomed hospital. That issue has been the subject of significant debate over the past 10 or 15 years in this place as to whether it should have been built, as to whether it should have been built with single rooms, as to whether it was too expensive, but that is a massive insurance policy for our state right now.

That is why this state government—and credit to them for doing this despite their previous objections to the hospital—have said that the RAH has to be the COVID hospital because it is the best place to deal with these patients because of the single rooms. Because of all the measures around infection control that were put in place when it was built, that is clearly what needs to be our focal point in terms of the system.

Sadly, we have a number of staff who are sitting on the sidelines at the moment. The matter of these staff has been raised a number of times in this house, but I would like to do so again. Our system relies upon a casual nursing staff workforce to fill shifts, to fill absences and to deal with the very busy times and all those other variances that happen throughout the year.

Those staff upon whom we usually rely have been stuck at home for the past month. They have had no shifts or the odd occasional shift. They are applying for other jobs. They are applying to Centrelink. They are not able to access the JobKeeper arrangements. If they were working in any other business, they would be able to because many of them have worked over 12 months. Because they work for the government, because they work for public hospitals, they are unable to access the JobKeeper arrangements and so they are receiving no income whatsoever.

This is something that other states have fixed. This is something that this government has chosen not to fix. I call on them: if we are going to say what a great health staff we have, then we have to actually look after them as well. We cannot just leave them without income during this period and expect them to pick up the pieces and to go and fight this invisible enemy later on, which could potentially threaten their lives, when we have not been looking after them at this point in time.

We also have concerns in terms of the way our health staff are looked after in terms of WorkCover arrangements, which we have talked about as well. We need to make sure that, if there is a diagnosis of COVID-19 in health workers, then we say, 'We presume that is because of the work you are doing. We are not going to make you jump through many hoops to get to the point of getting protection.' That needs to be a given. The government has the ability to do that. They have not done that, and we call upon them to do that.

We also continue to have too many threats, too many security issues, too many attacks on front-line workers, and this is something where more action can be taken as well, and we call upon the government to do that. Just yesterday we had another report in the paper of the thousands of incidents that have happened to our front-line workers over the past few years, and it is not good enough. We need to make sure that they are protected, we need to make sure that all the proper security is in place, and we need to make sure that people who commit those crimes receive the full extent of the law.

As I said, we are very proud that we have a public health system in Australia and in South Australia. When you compare us to the US, where people are not only facing the risks of COVID-19 and deaths from COVID-19 but they are facing massive hospital bills due to that at the same time and complete inequities in terms of healthcare coverage that people have access to, luckily we do not have that in Australia. However, I think it is safe to say that we could still improve upon the inequalities in our system, but it is important that we keep those elements in the public system.

So we have been campaigning not just during this pandemic but for the past year and a half on keeping SA Pathology in public hands. We are glad that has been reversed now and it will stay in public hands, according to the government, but we will continue to campaign to make sure that every element of our health system stays in public hands.

One of the interesting elements of this pandemic has been that people have generally been staying away from emergency departments. It has led to some concerns from some doctors that some people who probably should be attending emergency departments at the moment are not doing so out of fear and that might be leading to worse health outcomes for them, but we know that eventually that demand will return.

We know that we have seen incredible pressures over the past year on our emergency departments and on our health system. This was the original motion that we were going to discuss, in terms of the pressure that was on our health system, and we want to make sure that, as we look to the future, we make sure that our health system has the resources it needs to not return to where it was before.

This is an opportunity for us to consider what the future of health care in South Australia looks like, and I hope it is not one where the bottom line rules as it has been. I hope it is not one where we are bringing in corporate liquidators from interstate as we have been. One of the silver linings out of this process has been that their contract has been suspended.

We are not focusing on penny-pinching. We are not fighting the Ambulance Employees Association through the courts about the resources that paramedics need on the front line. We look to a future of a public-focused health system. We look to the future of a well-resourced public health system. We look to the future of a public health system where we value and protect and give the resources that we need to front-line doctors, nurses and other allied health staff, but also to those increasingly important people through this pandemic, the other essential workers—the cleaners, security staff, the orderlies, the other workers behind the scenes in the hospital.

One of the things we have campaigned on during this process is giving free hospital car parking to all those health workers, and we are very glad that the government has largely agreed. There are still some issues around some of the people missing out from that, but it is largely agreed. Where we were before was that they were facing massive increases. We do not want a return to that.

Let's look to assist them in the future, where we are looking after these people, the people who are risking their lives. They should have our protection. They should get the resources that they need. At the moment, they have the thanks of a very grateful state. Let's make sure that we are all united in helping them and giving them what they need not only now but also for many years to come in the future.

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta—Minister for Education) (11:47): I was pleased to support the suspension of standing orders earlier that enabled the member for Kaurna to effectively withdraw what was an utterly inappropriate—grubby almost—motion that he had put on the Notice Paper and instead offer this motion, which is entirely more suitable and—

Mr PICTON: Point of order: unparliamentary language directed at me.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Unparliamentary language?

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER: I do not want to hold up the house, so I withdraw the word 'grubby'. I congratulate the member for Kaurna on introducing in the place of his original motion an entirely more appropriate motion, a motion that I think—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you, Minister for Education.

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER: —does some very important things. Given that we received his proposed amendment about half an hour ago, it was late notice, but I had a chance to look at his motion before he introduced it and I thank him for giving us that half an hour's notice that we would be debating a different motion.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Minister for Education, if I could interrupt for a minute, you have indicated that you will be amending the motion.

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER: I am about to indicate that, but I have not yet indicated that. I am still talking on the motion as introduced originally and therefore I want to congratulate the member for Kaurna on adapting the motion and giving us that hour to have a look at the proposed change.

We agree with most of it, but I do think that, in the spirit this morning of our improving on the original motion, we have a particularly important further improvement to make because, while the motion as introduced does pay appropriate tribute to all the public health staff, all the staff in our hospitals and our healthcare system—doctors, nurses, paramedics and other health practitioners—I think that it would be remiss of this house not to particularly note at this time, given public health messaging, the way that the people of South Australia have done the right thing.

They have been led to do that right thing, particularly I think through their trust in the messaging they have received from the leadership in Health, from the government, and particularly from Professor Nicola Spurrier, our Chief Public Health Officer, and her deputy chief public health officers and their teams, and I congratulate them on that as well. It is a week since we had our last positive transmission of COVID-19 here in South Australia.

We also note that a number of the things that were called upon in the original draft of the motion from the member for Kaurna have taken place. Therefore, I seek leave to move an amendment by adding a new paragraph (b), as follows in the text below; by renumbering the existing paragraph (b) as paragraph (c) unamended, as indeed paragraph (a) is unamended; and by renumbering existing paragraphs (c) and (d), as (d) and (e) with minor amendments, as follows in the text. I hope this is a motion that every member in this house and every person in South Australia can get behind. I move to amend the motion as follows:

That this house—

(a) expresses its appreciation to the talented doctors, nurses, paramedics and other health practitioners and staff for their work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic;

(b) notes that it is now a week since South Australia has recorded a positive test for COVID-19 and thanks Professor Nicola Spurrier, her deputy chief public health officers and her team for their world-class public health leadership so far during this pandemic;

(c) recognises that the public health and hospital system is a critical factor in the protection for South Australians and that the system should always be well resourced and funded;

(d) notes the government has provided protections, such as personal protective equipment, to these hardworking health staff through the pandemic; and

(e) notes the government has provided necessary resources to our public hospitals to look after all patients in a timely and effective manner during this pandemic and will continue to do so.

The fact is that the COVID-19 pandemic has presented challenges to health systems around the world, many of which have struggled with them to the point of breaking. In SA Health, we did not want to see any of the images that we saw overseas happen here. We did not want that for our community and we certainly did not want that for our front-line health workers, who have put their lives on the line around the world. We have joined with people around the world, through electronic means in recent weeks, to support those systems, particularly those that have been in dire need stretching to collapse.

The extraordinary footage we have seen from Italy, the United Kingdom, New York and other jurisdictions around the world has absolutely caused enormous anxiety to everyone here, and it was critical from the government's point of view that SA Health and our health workforce be given every support they needed to ensure that could not happen. That is why we have put in place significant measures to increase PPE, the use of which has gone up dramatically in recent months, and the production of which is now coming back to South Australia.

The announcement that Detmold is retooling to be able to produce millions upon millions of items of PPE is an example of the government in South Australia working with private industry in a way that does not just support our health workers here in South Australia but will support the health workforce more broadly around Australia through that capacity, and that will be a capacity that will continue. Nicola Spurrier, her team and the hospitals have been working hard with the health networks to ensure that the use of PPE is absolutely available and appropriate in the necessary way.

To deal with the potential need for increased capacity, the government has done a range of other things. We have secured the old Wakefield hospital site, which was an important measure that the government was able to take with SA Health, to ensure that should the peak hit in a way that required significant extra capacity we would be able to have that. It would mean that not every hospital in South Australia necessarily needed to have COVID patients, so you could have some COVID-free hospitals, and that was an important part of the mix.

We have been able to reinvest further funds in reactivating the Repat in a way that would enable some of those wards to become available should the COVID pandemic peak hit in a way that needed extra capacity. If we had been debating the original motion, I think that issue would have been touched upon several times The fact that this government has saved the Repat and is now able to reactivate it in a way to help our fight against COVID-19 has been tremendously important.

There is a range of other hospitals that have bed capacity if there is a flex needed in COVID-19. Thankfully, we have a small number of people currently hospitalised with COVID-19. We only have two in ICU, and for those two it is a very difficult scenario. It is a tragedy that four people have passed away but, compared to what we have seen in other jurisdictions and around the world, it is relatively good news compared to what might have been the case.

How have we got there? There are a number of factors in our favour. There are things that the government has done, such as requiring a two-week quarantine for anyone coming into South Australia. There are things that all governments have done, through working with the national cabinet collaboratively with other states, that have been tremendously important—and we are seeing the benefit of those changes across Australia—but particularly the messaging that the people of South Australia have taken up.

This is a motion that indeed every South Australian can take credit for, with the introduction of the new paragraph (b) that talks about the public health messaging, led by Professor Nicola Spurrier, her team and her deputies. That is something where they have reached out to the public and the public have embraced it. They have embraced the capacity to do social distancing. They have embraced the capacity to practice strong hygiene habits. They have embraced the capacity to work from home where possible, particularly when there was a heightened level of risk of community transmission.

We celebrate the fact that in South Australia it is six days since we have had any positive diagnoses and it is well over a month now since there has been an example of untraced community transmission. That is a credit to the fact that our testing regime is the best in Australia, and Australia's is pretty much the best in the world. There have been more than 54,000 tests in South Australia. We are currently underway with a blitz and, since the beginning of that blitz, there has been not even so much as a handful of new cases identified.

The contact tracing team has been a spectacularly important part of the work as well, which is also led by Professor Spurrier and her team. They have been able to identify the networks of all but seven and found the epidemiological first cause of where that transmission has come from—usually from overseas, some from interstate and many from cruise ships, indeed. We have been able to get on top of clusters, such as the one in the Barossa. I am so pleased that schools in the Barossa and businesses in the Barossa are reopening today after the period where that cluster was expressed as a concern. They have got on top of it and they are doing well.

There is always going to be more that we are looking to do. Health is a complex and large area, and the government is working hard and has been working hard. It was pleasing to see improvements through our health system, improvements in terms of supports where they needed to be, even prior to the COVID crisis. It was pleasing to see a number of the issues left to us by the legacy of the failed Transforming Health experiment starting to subside even before COVID 19.

Our job is to keep South Australians safe. The government is doing it and our healthcare professionals, all of the workers identified in this motion, deserve every credit that we give them and we thank them for their work.

Ms COOK (Hurtle Vale) (11:58): I rise in support of the revised motion, as moved by the member for Kaurna, the shadow spokesperson for health and wellbeing on this side of the house. It is a really appropriate week to be talking with respect to the hard work and care that is shown by so many health workers in our state. That encompasses a whole range of skills, from administrative staff to cleaners, orderlies, ambulance workers, public health, public servants, nurses, doctors and a whole range of people who have come together to work so hard.

Yesterday was International Workers' Memorial Day, which is a day when we reflect on those people who have lost their lives in the duty of undertaking their work. Of course, we know that over the last few months across the globe hundreds of healthcare workers have lost their lives purely because they have turned up to work in order to save others. It is an appropriate moment in this house that we can choose to talk about some of the things that have been done well here in South Australia—in fact, across Australia—as compared to some of the things that have happened across the globe during the COVID pandemic.

In doing that, we also congratulate and thank many people who have stood up and advocated strongly for people working in the healthcare sector, and I will single out a few people or groups in respect of that. In particular, we have heard from the South Australian branch of the Australian Nurses and Midwifery Federation (ANMF), with Elizabeth Dabars taking a front role in that advocacy to ensure that the needs of our healthcare workers are expressed. I have heard from the United Workers Union and the Australian Services Union very loudly in terms of the failings in the provision of protective equipment for people, the PPE we talk about so frequently.

I note there has been an amendment to the amended motion that notes the government has, in fact, provided the PPE required. Well, the job is not done. It came quite late in the piece when we saw a large supply of PPE; in fact, that happened in the last sitting week of parliament. Some 31 million pieces or thereabouts were supplied to Australia during a period of time when it was being called for by healthcare workers, disability workers and all other people who were coming into contact with COVID patients or people at risk of carrying COVID. It was a time of great fear amongst healthcare workers and that has not gone away.

I have hundreds of friends who work in health care; that is my background. They are calling out constantly about the confusion around the PPE. It has been a bone of contention, of course. We heard publicly that there was some doubt around the integrity of masks that were being provided to healthcare staff within hospitals. I can tell you, from having worn PPE through some of the other pandemic situations such as bird flu and SARS, that having PPE on you is like armour. If you doubt the integrity of it while you are wearing it, your mind is elsewhere when you are trying to focus on your patient who is critically ill.

To have some doubt about the types of protective equipment that are being worn within our health system in this day and age is a terrible blight and a sad indictment of our capacity to look after healthcare workers. We have to make sure that that does not happen again. There needs to be no doubt and they need to be assured that they are provided with the best possible equipment. I think the rate at which the pandemic approached us and the spread of the disease in the early days was a real wake-up call and we should take that as a massive lesson that we cannot let that happen again.

I still see people talking on social media and in the public, saying things like, 'Oh, it's only a cold. This is just a flu. Many more people die of the flu across the world.' I need to say that that is absolute nonsense. I have listened to some of the more right-wing commentators around the world and their throwaway statements. I think the best example would be Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who made commentary about how he had been in the hospital and shook everyone's hands, saying, 'It's okay. Look at me, I'm fine.' A week later, he would have been trying to breathe sucking through cement in his lungs. Even with the constant attention of the best skilled medical and clinical staff in the country at that given moment, he still faced death.

This disease process is something you cannot imagine. It is not a cold. You cannot just blow your nose. You have cement in your lungs and oxygen does not pass through. This is a devastating illness. We are also seeing evidence across the globe that it turns into something sinister in young people. There are people who carry this without symptoms.

I congratulate the amazing public health team in South Australia. It has not just appeared; this public health team has been in South Australia and has been built up over decades. These things do not happen overnight. Associate Professor Nicola Spurrier and her team have done an incredible job of pulling together the best possible evidence that we have, bringing that to a level that the public understand and putting that messaging out into our community so that we have been able to stop the spread.

We have flattened the curve, but the job is not done. To note that the PPE has been provided is lovely, but the job is not done. We cannot keep the borders closed forever. Australia will have to open up at some point, and what we will be relying on is that other countries have also stopped the spread and have also flattened their curve, and that we do not allow people into the country who are carrying this lethal virus unknowingly and then unwittingly spreading it to others. What we have done now by flattening the curve, by providing some additional skills to workers, has given us a bit of breathing space, a bit of a capacity to be able to handle another wave if that should come.

I know many people who are working in this space at the moment—not to be named, but thanking you all for the amazing work you are doing—and it would be remiss if I did not use this as an opportunity to talk about some words that were said in the upper house yesterday. There was a lack of understanding by the health minister of the numbers of casual nurses who have been left without work—highly skilled, highly agile, casual nurses on whom we will be relying as we ramp up our activity in hospitals again.

There was a waving away of the Hon. Emily Bourke, who asked a very reasonable question of the minister about these casual nurses. There was a suggestion that the Hon. Emily Bourke was implying that we should turn economics upside down, turn it on its head and provide guaranteed work for all casuals. Actually, the people who contacted me last night were horrified; they saw it as a version of misogyny. They thought she was being berated like a little girl, and to her credit Emily has not made an issue of this. The Hon. Emily Bourke has just copped that and thought, 'Well, this is just typical. We'll leave it where it is.'

But I can tell you that the nurses who contacted me are absolutely horrified and disgusted. These nurses' plight is to be left with no choice but to be on casual contracts. There are no full-time permanent jobs, no part-time permanent jobs. They are often young people who would love to work full time, but they cannot. They are parents, family members, skilled clinicians. I spoke about this a couple of weeks ago and I will use every opportunity to remind South Australia of what has happened with the attitude of this state government around dedicated, committed casual workers who are not able to apply for JobKeeper, and as such have been left without the ability to feed and support their families for up to six to eight weeks without a shift. I hope that changes.

Shame on you, Hon. Stephen Wade in the other place, for not understanding and not doing something about these workers whose help you will be calling out and screaming for over the next month. I commend the motion as amended by the member for Kaurna, and I thank him for his diligence and his open communication with not just me but with the public.

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee) (12:08): It gives me great pleasure to rise and make a contribution to this motion, a motion which principally congratulates those hardworking men and women who have put themselves in harm's way day after day, week after week, in our health system. I cannot imagine what it must have been like five weeks ago, when the number of cases in South Australia was doubling every two to three days, to have to front up to work and know that you were likely going to be dealing with people who were infected with the coronavirus.

I know there have been concerns from health workers about the availability and quality of the personal protective equipment, but, putting that to one side, even with the best, most impenetrable personal protective equipment it must have been an incredibly stressful experience to be working for many hours in that sort of environment. Of course you can also reflect on those people more broadly in the community who were not quite placed in such a situation in harm's way but nonetheless still had to front up to work and encounter, in the course of their work, many hundreds of people. I am thinking of, for example, retail workers who particularly have had to staff check-outs, dealing with dozens upon dozens of people coming through buying goods during this period.

Despite all that anxiety and the stress that those health workers must have been feeling, they have done the most unbelievable job for our community. It has been extraordinary. Along with the broader community—the rest of us, doing our best to abide by the directions to stay distant from one another, to stay at home, to limit our adventures beyond our homes to only the most necessary of purposes—our health workers have kept a lid on the spread of this virus to the extent that it has been six days now since we had a recorded new case of coronavirus in South Australia. For each of those six days, the people who have coronavirus have continued to get better in most cases; of course, we are still troubled by the reports of people in intensive care.

As we have kept a lid on the spread of this virus and as we have kept a lid on the increase in the number of people who have caught it, more and more people have recovered from the virus, and that is a terrific thing. It now feels like, for our community, there is light at the end of the tunnel. That light is becoming brighter and more distinct, that we can once again set about doing those things that perhaps we only now realise we hold so dear: going and seeing our broader families, seeing our friends and our other loved ones, participating in organised sport and so on or taking two very energetic under five-year-old boys out of the house for a change, down to a playground. Those are the sorts of things that we are all looking forward to doing.

I am sure that the government will find an appropriate way in due course to recognise the efforts of Professor Spurrier and her team, who have led us through this period, and perhaps also find an appropriate way to recognise the efforts of the other clinical and medical staff who have played such a key role in doing this. I would encourage the government, I would encourage the Minister for Health and the Premier, to find an appropriate way to recognise those efforts in due course. Of course, we should recognise that the job is not yet done. We need to get through another period where the curve is flattened for a longer period, if I can put it so bluntly, before we can feel that we are clear of this as a community, but I would encourage the government to do that. I think that would be the least that our community can do to recognise these people.

I would like to spend a couple of minutes just reflecting on the genesis of the motion that we are making contributions to today and that I think all members of the chamber would be wholeheartedly supporting. This motion was originally moved in a far different form by the member for Kaurna; in fact, if my memory serves me correctly, it was moved as the parliament was reconstituted after it was prorogued. I think that was in very early February.

That was at a time when coronavirus was not a concern for us here in South Australia. Perhaps for those people who were engaged in international medical matters, it might have been something that was happening many thousands of kilometres away, but it was not a concern here for the rest of us. The motion took a form to raise concern again at how this government was managing the state's health system. The first two budgets of this government had significant cuts to SA Health and in particular the Central Adelaide Local Health Network.

Indeed, in the first budget alone, not long after the Liberal Party came to government here in South Australia, huge cuts to the Central Adelaide Local Health Network were made, including cutting 884 full-time equivalent health workers: doctors, nurses, clinicians, other medical staff, allied health professionals and so on. They were very significant cuts. This happened at the same time that ramping of ambulances outside our hospitals was reaching levels that had never been seen before in South Australia. In response, the government built a wall around the ramping so that it could not be seen by the public or, more to the point, by the media at the new Royal Adelaide Hospital.

Mrs Power interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN: The member for Elder yells out across the chamber. She is free to make a contribution, of course, to this debate. She shakes her head, though, so clearly she will not be game to.

On top of the ramping, the cuts to the health budget, the cuts to the CALHN budget and the cuts to staffing levels of nearly 1,000 full-time equivalents we had the introduction of corporate liquidators KordaMentha. Of course, it is this government's view that there is no professional in South Australia able to conduct forensic accounting services capable of going into SA Health, and so it was necessary to parachute in corporate liquidators from interstate to do this work. This is a theme we will be hearing a lot more about this year, how this government relies on interstate workers to carry out the labour that South Australians are more than capable of doing.

Nonetheless, these interstate corporate liquidators parachute in at remarkable salaries and start swinging the axe in our health network to remarkable effect. In fact, the only news that KordaMentha was able to report about whether they were doing any good in SA Health was the report that they had merely sent more invoices out to be paid to SA Health. How remarkable! There was no change, there was no improvement in systems, there was no rectifying what corporate liquidator Chris Martin called 'dysfunction' within SA Health, merely the issuance of more invoices. Apparently, that is worth paying $20 million to a cooperative liquidator for.

Of course, it does not stop there at $20 million. It is nearly $50 million that their total contract was due for. It was not just the employment of corporate liquidators: it was also the announcement that if SA Pathology did not cough up $105 million worth of budget savings over three years it would be privatised. SA Pathology is the very organisation that has been responsible for helping us get through this coronavirus crisis, through what we are told by the government is the most extensive testing regime in the world. This is what they wanted to privatise. They did not want it controlled by government, they did not want public sector employees involved: they wanted to hand it over to the private sector so that it could be subjected to swingeing cuts and, once again, the profit motive.

What have we seen in the midst of this coronavirus pandemic? We have seen this government, with its tail between its legs, have to retreat from having corporate liquidators operating in the Central Adelaide Local Health Network. We have seen the Premier forced into admitting in the middle of a radio interview that he will no longer privatise SA Pathology. When the Treasurer fronted that same radio network later that day and was asked about it, he said that that was the first he had heard of it. He was not even aware of it. He was not aware that the Premier had now committed not to sell SA Pathology to the private market.

Congratulations to the health system here in South Australia, to the doctors and the nurses and the hardworking medicos who have protected our community so well and have treated the ill during this time. You can understand the pressure they have been under, not just from the coronavirus but from this government.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Is the member for King looking to speak?

Ms LUETHEN: No.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: If not, the member for Kaurna will speak and close the debate.

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (12:18): I would like to thank the speakers on this motion and note the amendment that has been moved by the Minister for Education, which I will get to in detail. I indicate that on the whole the opposition is supportive of the amendment and particularly supportive of the inclusion of paragraph (b), which I will talk about in some detail. We do have some issues with their amendments to paragraphs (d) and (e), however, and I will get to that as well.

I would particularly like to thank the member for Hurtle Vale and the member for Lee for their comments, and for their commitment and passion to the subject. The member for Hurtle Vale knows more about looking after people in ICU than anybody in this house, and probably anybody who has sat in this house for a very long period of time—if ever—which is vitally important to all of us, and provided good advice to me as well during this time.

The Minister for Education made a number of comments in terms of the amendment being provided to him late. I would like to clarify that, up until this morning, this motion was listed way down the agenda, at No. 13 or something like that. Since it has now come back to the top, we worked to come up with an amendment to the motion that I believed everyone would agree to without needing further amendments, so I was surprised that we had to have a further amendment to it.

I was working on it in the hope of a bipartisan outcome to this motion, given the times we are in. I think that is what the community are looking for: I think they are looking for what the plan is for the future, and they are looking for the government to continue looking after our health workers throughout the length of however long this pandemic lasts and, after that, also into the future. So it is surprising that the government is seeking to amend the motion to such an extent that, instead of calling on the government to do everything possible to provide personal protection equipment for our front-line staff, they are now noting that they have provided such equipment.

Ms Cook: The job's not done.

Mr PICTON: Yes. The government might be patting itself on the back, but this is a job not done yet. There is a long way to go in terms of providing PPE. We will see many TV pictures of boxes arriving at warehouses, and I can assure members that they are being used up by our healthcare staff who need them on the front line and that we are going to need more and more after that. I absolutely congratulate our local manufacturers for the work done in terms of surgical masks, but we do need work in terms of fitted masks, N95 masks, which are absolutely needed by our front-line workers, to make sure that they have the absolute protection that they need, let alone all the other measures, such as gloves, gowns and face shields, which we know are of critical importance as well. So this is a job not yet done.

We will not be opposing that amendment, but we do note that it is premature for the government to be patting themselves on the back and saying, 'Our job on PPE is done,' because there is a long way to go. In particular, I would like to pick up on something that the member for Lee raised, which I was remiss in not noting in my speech, in relation to voluntary separation payments to health staff. It was a campaign that was underway up until midway through this pandemic, and the government has now suspended that.

As we look to the future, as I outlined, we need to be thinking about what our health system is going to look like. We cannot have that program being part of the future. We cannot have the focus being on removing health staff—doctors, nurses and allied health professionals—from our front lines in the future. That program should not just be suspended, it should end. It should be scrapped entirely, and we should be focusing on how we can help those people, rather than how many we can remove from the system.

Last but definitely not least, I absolutely support the inclusion of paragraph (b), our public health staff. As I have noted in the parliament before when debating a number of bills, Professor Spurrier and staff all the way down to our contact tracing teams and other public health staff on the front line have done an incredible job. We are very thankful in this state for their professionalism and for the hard work that they have done on behalf of us all.

Amendment carried; motion as amended carried.