Grievance Debate

Glenelg Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Centre

Mr PATTERSON (Morphett) (15:04): In August, I presented a petition to parliament from 1,015 people that urged the government to reject Maturin House, Glenelg as the proposed location for a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre that the Malinauskas government has provided funding for. The primary reasons laid out in the petition were to ensure the wellbeing of local primary school students and to provide clients of the proposed facility greater prospects of successful treatment.

Maturin House is an old house from the 1890s, with small rooms and only one common room, and the only outdoor area is the front yard on the same street as the local primary school, St Peter's Woodlands, which has an entrance 200 metres away from the proposed drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic. It is just the wrong location.

In a major development regarding the proposed drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre at Glenelg, local residents are having to commence legal proceedings against the Labor health minister to stop this Crown development application that has taken away the ability for individuals to be consulted. The residents are wonderful people, who are considerate and do charity work. They understand the need for rehabilitation centres in the correct location. Their arguments laid out in the legal proceedings are the same arguments that I have been challenging the Minister for Health on.

The Minister for Health took the extraordinary step of avoiding public scrutiny by sponsoring this simple change of use application as essential infrastructure, a title normally reserved for major projects, such as hospitals and schools. Residents are saying that the health minister has behaved unlawfully, and have now been left with no option but to seek a judicial review in the Supreme Court.

Recently, I attended the State Commission Assessment Panel, where the panel met to provide a recommendation to the Minister for Planning regarding the rehabilitation facility. Because the change of use application was sponsored by the Minister for Health as a Crown development, only the City of Holdfast Bay and Uniting Communities could make representations.

At the meeting, it was revealed that the drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility will be the largest facility that Uniting Communities has ever operated in Adelaide—nearly double—and also only 200 metres from a primary school. To rub salt into the wound of the school community, who have not been able to be heard, one of the panel members asked if the school was comfortable with the drug rehabilitation facility, and Uniting Communities answered on behalf of the school community.

What a joke! This is like asking the fox if the chickens are comfortable with the fox looking after them in the henhouse. It just shows that this is a bungled process by the health minister, with poor procedure all the way along, where concerned parents and community members have been continually blocked from their right to have a say on this controversial drug facility development. It is just not fair. No wonder concerned parents feel the health minister has turned his back on them and their children.

The local community is also concerned that the government's tender for this facility stipulated 22 suburbs recommended by SA Health as being best suited for a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility. All 22 of those suburbs were within Labor-held electorates. The tender outlined that alternative offers may not be submitted, but instead Glenelg, which was not on the suburb list, was chosen by the Malinauskas Labor government.

The Labor government has left my local community with no other way to have their concerns heard than to take legal action against the Minister for Health, who has labelled these concerns of parents and residents as 'blatant nimbyism and shameful'. In fact, it is the actions of the Minister for Health that are shameful, because in a cost-of-living crisis locals, including pensioners, are having to dip into their own pockets to fund legal action because he refuses to listen to their concerns.

They have started a GoFundMe page to fight this, but it need not come to that. I am calling on the health minister to cease his Crown development application and ask Uniting Communities to respect the concerns in the community and submit their change of use application with the Holdfast Bay council, to give people in my community the opportunity to be consulted and respected, bringing with it the proper public scrutiny that has been missing in a process that has been botched right from the start.