New Women's and Children's Hospital

Mrs HURN (Schubert) (15:00): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Does the minister guarantee that the new Women's and Children's Hospital will be built and delivered on time and on budget?

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (15:00): I welcome the opportunity to talk about our investment in the new Women's and Children's Hospital, because this will be a hospital which will be bigger and better than both the current hospital and also the plans for the new hospital that the previous government had.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: It's interesting. It was basically going to be opened by now apparently under their original plan, but the plans for this hospital—how many extra beds do you think, a dozen? No, one—one extra overnight bed.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The member for Elder and the member for Newland will come to order.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: That is really thinking for the long term in terms of the investment of health in this state. In fact, when we announced our plans for the new Women's and Children's Hospital, the shadow minister was running around saying, 'We should have kept it going on the old plans, these plans were ready to go.' Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only would that have led to a Women's and Children's Hospital that would have been far too small, but it also would have taken up vital space for the future expansion of the Royal Adelaide Hospital which we know at some stage will need to expand, and that space would have been taken up forever by the new Women's and Children's Hospital.

So we made the difficult decision to move the hospital to the barracks site. I am delighted that stage 1 of those works are well underway. We have seen cranes recently installed on that site for the first stage of those works on that site. The detailed work is still underway in terms of the hospital. Of course, we are working to make sure that we meet those objectives in terms of the timelines, in terms of the budgets and the clinical planning. We have got more consultation to go with our clinicians and more contracting to do with our contractors, but we can absolutely guarantee that this will be a hospital that will set us up for the long term for the future of women's and children's health in this state, as opposed to what was planned by those opposite, which would have been full the day it opened.