Health Services

The Hon. E.S. BOURKE (15:44): There are people behind the stories of fatigued clinicians, ambulance officers and the unwell calling for help that takes too long to arrive. Behind these people there are also powerful stories, like Agatha, a 93-year-old woman who was ramped outside the Royal Adelaide Hospital for hours this week; like Audrey, a little seven year old, whose appendix burst while waiting for treatment in an overcrowded Women's and Children's Hospital emergency department; like Geoff, a father who had to wait over two hours for an ambulance to arrive to provide help to his son who had a seizure while at school, only to arrive at the Flinders Medical Centre to be told there are no beds and to go home; and like Dr Brett Ritchie, who feels the Women's and Children's Hospital is at the point where resources are so thin on the ground that we are seeing errors that should be avoidable with proper resourcing.

The reality is that anyone in this chamber, any South Australian, could be caught up in this crisis. It could be any of our names and any of our stories. When you have clinicians and ambulance officers in uniform fronting the media to call for help, no politician should look the other way. This is a rare event that shows the true severity of this crisis.

Doctors have expressed their fear of telling their stories, that they were pressured by management not to speak out about things they were seeing and the pressures they were feeling. They were concerned that the act of speaking up might go against them personally and professionally and perhaps result in negative outcomes for the unit they are responsible for.

I would say that they are brave individuals who are yet again putting the safety of South Australians before their personal interests. They are proud individuals who have dedicated their working lives to provide care and safety for all in this chamber, our families and those we represent. The Marshall Liberal government has brought in corporate liquidators KordaMentha to implement an agenda that has cost the safety of our community, and we are all paying the price.

According to the Auditor-General, in net terms 112 nurses have been cut in the past year. South Australia is the only state to cut ambulance funding, with a reduction of $11 million over the past two years. The government has the levers to pull in order to fix this crisis and they should start pulling them, rather than going about continuing to push their political agenda, to tick off all the boxes before one person retires, to have a referendum on shop trading hours, to build basketball stadiums not in this term, next term, but maybe the term after.

These are not the things that people are looking for at this point in time. They are looking for reassurance that, when they call for an ambulance, an ambulance will come. They are looking for reassurance that, when they turn up at the Women's and Children's Hospital with a sick child, they will be seen not in five hours but maybe the first hour.

We are elected into this chamber to ensure that we use taxpayers' money in an appropriate way, in a way that is for the betterment of all South Australians. South Australians are feeling let down by this government. It is time to look to these problems, to listen to these stories and to do something about them. It is time to act.