Regional Services

Mr HUGHES (Giles) (15:46): Like many on our side of the chamber, we were out on the steps at lunchtime with our hardworking ambulance workers. It is interesting to listen to the story from that side, as opposed to the direct story from the people who are at the coalface—the people who are in their ambulances day after day doing the hard work and doing the caring work.

The emphasis is often on what is happening here in Adelaide with ramping, and indeed ramping here in Adelaide does impact upon regional communities, but there are some real issues with regional communities as well. There is a lack of ambulances and a lack of staff for any proposed ambulances—not that there are any proposed new ambulances—and that is deeply concerning because in my community of Whyalla and in the community of Port Augusta there is a real ambulance shortage, which is causing serious problems and putting people's lives at risk. It will be for a Labor government to effectively address those issues when, hopefully, come March, there will be a change of government, so it was good to meet the ambulance workers today.

During last week, I met with TAFE workers, high school employees involved in vocational education, contractors and the AEU about the state of TAFE and especially the state of TAFE in regional areas, and the stories were deeply, deeply concerning. There is no doubt that in my community TAFE has been the preferred provider for decades when it comes to apprenticeship training for the steelworks and for the mines, our largest employer, whether we are going back to BHP, OneSteel, Arrium, GFG, LIBERTY steel or SIMEC Mining days.

TAFE no longer does that work. That work is now done by a private provider here in Adelaide, which means those apprentices have to come down to Adelaide because the major employer believed that the quality was not there anymore and that TAFE is being deliberately run down and hollowed out in the regions. I do not think there is any doubt about that. For the occasional little victory I had, such as retaining hairdressing, there is other stuff that is going on that is deeply disturbing.

But what I want to talk about for the next three minutes is aged care in my community. We have seen the closure of 50 nursing home beds at Annie Lockwood, part of the Kindred Living operations in Whyalla. Most of the 38 people who were using those beds have been found places elsewhere in Whyalla with Kindred Living. Some have moved to other communities, and they have willingly done so in the main. It is deeply concerning that the loss of those 50 beds means that aged-care people in my community who now need a nursing home bed are going to have to go, in many instances, hundreds of kilometres away from the community that they have lived in, in many cases for all their life, away from the community where their families live. The stress on the person who has to move out and the stress on the family is huge.

I have said before in this chamber that if you cannot get a nursing home bed in one place in Adelaide, the odds are you can get one in a suburb over or a couple of suburbs over. You have public transport and you have other ways of getting around. That does not happen in the country, and this federal government has overseen what is an absolute train wreck when it comes to the provision of aged-care services in this nation, especially in regional Australia.

The number of nursing home facilities in regional Australia that were at risk of closure earlier this year is 166. Seventy-eight per cent were operating at a loss. This is all courtesy of a federal government that cut, cut, cut and introduced formulas that did not reflect the needs that exist when it comes to nursing home places, poor workforce planning and a whole raft of other issues, including wages and conditions. The federal government is the funder and the regulator, but we all know that this is the least accountable federal government that I believe we have had in the history of this country.