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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Second Session (51-2)
2008-06-18 Daily Xml
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APPROPRIATION BILL

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading (resumed on motion).

(Continued from page 3604.)

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (16:06): What other possible reason could there be for the Country Health Care Plan to be published 1½ hours after the budget was released last week and after the parliament got up? The Minister for Health would have us believe that it was because the government needed an extra six months longer than it had indicated, namely, by December 2007, to consult with the public. It needed extra time so that is why they needed the extra period. I will come back to that.

I will give another explanation. It is because the government had to get rid of the critics. Who are they? They are the hospital boards of the hospitals across South Australia—the people who have been responsible (until the Health Care Act abolished them) for the services provided in their hospitals, the employment of people in their hospitals and the management of assets in their hospitals.

These three very important responsibilities were quarantined and protected under the act from interference by the minister. How do you get rid of the critics, the voice piece of these boards? You abolish them. And that is exactly what the Health Care Act did. In addition to that, legislation was passed previously making the Chief Executive Officer of the Department of Health the employing authority for the more than 20,000 employees in our hospitals and health department—and to ensure that came into operation with the transfer of responsibility in the Health Care Plan, that had to get through.

That is actually the real reason. The government had to silence the people by getting rid of the advocates who were appointed as the board members. That is another reason, I suggest, why the government snuck that out in between. It axed the boards and it had to gag the workers (because, of course, they will be employed by the department) to ensure that there is silence against the tide of anger.

If he had been out there today on the front steps of Parliament House, the minister would understand that the country people of South Australia do not accept this, and they voiced that very clearly. If he has people at the Kangaroo Island Hospital and the Kapunda Hospital and people at the proposed rallies all around South Australia, the minister will get a very clear message that the country people will not be silenced over this.

His idea of consultation, which he claims was the basis for the delay in the introduction of this plan which is ongoing, is utter nonsense. It is simply not accurate to suggest that there is consultation. If members opposite do not believe me, listen to this. Just this week, Dr David Senior, an experienced general practitioner and a member of the government's Clinical Senate (the advisory group to government representing clinicians across South Australia), resigned. He has made public that he strongly believes that the Clinical Senate, this body of clinicians and bureaucrats, has been misled by the so-called consultations over the last few months. Such is the depth of concern that has been raised that this doctor has resigned from the one remaining voice, I suppose, of the clinicians to the government that they have been misled about this. He is a highly respected doctor, and I commend him for being brave enough to come forward.

Secondly, Mr George Beltchev, the head of Country Health SA, stationed at Port Augusta, is going to all these public meetings around South Australia and telling people what they will get. There has not been any consultation. The list of people that the minister announced today as having been consulted is not accepted out there. This is not consultation.

Thirdly, Dr Tony Sherbon, the Chief Executive of the Department of Health, and one of the second senior bureaucrats, Dr Panter, have been scheduled already for a national conference in September to tell Australia about the success of the reforms in restructuring in South Australia. I have received an invitation to the conference. So, it is utter nonsense that the minister comes in and tells us that the government will still be consulting about the Country Health Care Plan. That is absolute rubbish!

The government already has a national conference organised to replicate this disaster around the country. It is little wonder that Dr Peter Rischbeith of the Rural Doctors Association has called for the Prime Minister to intervene in South Australia to ensure that this plan is axed, because he knows that this is not consultation and that this will not work. The minister had the opportunity today to tell us of just one of the 43 hospitals that is about to be downgraded to GP Plus centres that has asked for it. He had that opportunity, but, of course, there is none.

Not one mother has rung me and said, 'I live in the country with a sick child, and I want you to get rid of services at my local hospital.' Not one doctor has rung me and said, 'This would enhance the teaching opportunities and workforce for South Australia and medical services for country people.' Not one nurse has rung me and said, 'Close my hospital so that I have to get in a car and drive miles to the next town to keep my job.' Not one resident in South Australia has rung me and said, 'This is an important initiative. We want to donate the services of our hospital. We want to cut the budget to enable the state government to build the Marjorie Jackson-Nelson Hospital.' Not one. The minister was not able to identify today one person who has come forward and said, 'This is what we want for the country.'

The final and really cruel twist in this is that the minister talks about staying out there and consulting. We know that the budget papers were approved in cabinet a month ago. They were signed off, proof read, printed and presented here last week. This health plan has been identified in and referred to in the budget papers that are weeks old. There is no excuse for this not being there. And talk about consultation. The figure allocated for country health acute services in this year's budget—printed and approved by this government for 2008-09—is $250,518,000, which is less than in 2007-08.

Why is this so important? Because even to maintain the same level of standard of services in the country, even if the government were to transfer some to the four hub hospitals and cancel some in the others (and let us assume that was a good idea), why is it that the minister can announce that less money will be spent this year, not even any provision for what is necessary just to keep up with the increase in salaries and wages of these people? This is what exposes the lie of the government that it is out there still consulting about this. It has done the work, it has made the decisions, it has added up the money, and it has featured it in its budget. It is there in black and white.

This consultation is bureaucratic bulldust, and the minister needs to be brought to account for this. It is totally unacceptable that the very doctors who are relying on having hospitals so that they can continue to treat patients in country South Australia, so that they can continue to teach the next generation of health professionals, today delivered a very clear and repeated message, namely, if there are no hospitals in these towns, there will be no doctors, there will be no future workforce, there will be no towns, and there will therefore be no provision for the future wealth of this state.

One-third of the population lives in country South Australia. If any pinhead in the Department of Health had looked at a map of South Australia they would have known that most country people live east of Port Augusta and north of Keith and would have realised what a stupid idea it was to put these four hub hospitals outside of the zone within which it is easier for them to get to rather than go to Adelaide.

One-third of them live out there in the country of South Australia, yet they are given in this budget one seventh of the acute hospital care budget. The budget this year will be $3.8 billion. In rough figures $1.8 billion will be spent on some public health, policy work and bureaucrats. The other $2 billion will be spent on acute care hospitals. Of that, $1,780 million will be spent on the eight or so hospitals here in metropolitan Adelaide and only $250 million (one-seventh of the total acute care budget) on 68 hospitals out in country South Australia. Is that fair? Is that equitable? No, that is a disgrace!

So, for the government to say this is a health care plan that will enhance and provide better health for South Australian country people is an absolute furphy. It is a gross misrepresentation of what they are about to slash and burn in the country, and they must be brought to account for it.

The government says it is necessary to do this because of the cost pressures on government for the provision of health services. I want to remind the house that this is the seventh budget of the government and, notwithstanding its mantra about this, the total health budget as a percentage of the total state budget has gone from 24 per cent to 29.2 per cent. Where is this ever-exploding proportion of the budget? Education, incidentally, has stayed about the same. It has actually dropped a little bit since the member for Taylor was minister for education, but that is hardly surprising since we have fewer children coming into our public school system and we have more people using the public health sector. That is logical. The alarmist mantra of the government is not met by the fact that there is an explosion of health costs that are going to ravage and haemorrhage the state budget balance, and that is simply not replicated.

The second thing the government says is that there is already a shortage of workforce in country regions so they need to change the model. We would also look at this. We understand that in some areas there are shortages. But we have looked at the city as well, and there are shortages here. Of course, there will be a heck of a lot of shortages come 2016 when they have build the Taj Mahal on the western end of North Terrace and they cannot staff that.

So I say that it is not acceptable to replicate one set of health workers with another set and say, 'We are missing a doctor or a nurse here.' If they cannot get them to the country, how will they get the other people—the dieticians, the counsellors and the other allied health service people who will advise us how to keep healthy so that we improve the health profile? It is simply not going to happen. It will evaporate, and it will be another excuse for them then to wind down the GP Plus emergency centres, because there will be no GP left, and there will be no-one else going out there to provide the advice and counselling in the education centre role they want. Meanwhile, the staff who are actually already out there, thousands of them, will have to drive miles to get a job in another town.

The other thing the government says is that the bed occupancy rate is really low in country hospitals, that it is 40 per cent to 50 per cent, on average, of bed occupancy rates. So, if a hospital has 10 acute care beds at any one time, perhaps only four or five patients are in them. Well, wake up Mr Hill, Minister for Health. He should go to the Royal Adelaide Hospital, the Modbury Hospital and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, to name a few, and see the rows and rows of corridors where there are empty rooms. There are beds in storage that are not being occupied. In fact, if the minister was honest, he would know that his own hospital at the Royal Adelaide, when his government came to office, had 850 beds, operational. It is down to 650. He is out there pretending what a good bloke he is going to be by opening an 800 bed hospital in 2016, but the truth is we are going to get fewer beds there.

It is an absolute insult to country people to think that they have beds open that have a major operational cost in their budgets, to think they will have all these nurses sitting around reading Women's Weekly. It is just an absolute nonsense. It is an absolute insult to these people to think that they are wasting all this money. They are some of the most efficient and best-run hospitals in the state and if the minister was not listening to those mindless morons in his department he would understand the basics about the provision of services and that, when you close services, you do not have them in place—and bear in mind his Berri and Whyalla enhancements are not even going to be ready for 2010-11 while he slashes in the meantime.

But any brainless dimwit, any complete pinhead, would understand that if you create this problem we will have more people turn up in the city. He says it would be a good thing to get them back out in the country. I agree with him, but his program on this is going to be devastating for country people but also will create a massive increase in the number of people in the city. You already have to wait, on average, 6½ hours in an emergency department in a metropolitan hospital. How much worse is it going to be? You already have to wait over thee years on the public elective surgery list to get a hip replacement. You already have to wait 37 months to get a set of dentures on the denture list. It is not going to make it better: it is going to make it worse. And these people are going to have to line up behind that. So the bed occupancy rate is not valid.

The final thing the government says is that people out in the country smoke more, are apparently fatter, have poorer health, and have more chronic diseases. I agree with that. The data is there, and it is true. But do they think that the local GP, or the people who are working in allied health, are not actually already giving advice on these things? Of course they are. When someone comes in and has a problem with smoking, doesn't a doctor say to them, 'Look, mate, you are going to have to give up smoking because this is a problem'? Of course they do!

So, saying that these people have to have primary health care is fine, but not at the expense of acute care. Clearly, from what the minister has repeated today, country people are older, sicker and poorer—and they have to put up with the drought in the meantime—and he is going to take away their acute care services because he says they need to learn to give up smoking, lose weight, change their diet and all those other primary things, as though this will be some panacea with respect to health.

I have piles of letters in my office from people who are outraged by this proposal, and when the first child dies because they have an asthma attack and cannot get help, and when the first person has a heart attack, those letters will go straight to the minister, because those deaths or any medical trauma that concerns country people will go straight to his desk.

The minister will pay a political price for this ridiculous program which he wants to impose on country people, who, I remind the house, constitute a third of the state's population. They are out there paying taxes, as the minister knows. They are out there creating wealth for this state. The Premier barks every day about the mining future of this state, and what is he doing? He is ravaging the infrastructure that is the very chance of keeping the country alive.

Time expired.

Mr HANNA (Mitchell) (16:23): This is my opportunity to respond to the 2008 state budget. There is a lot of good in it, and it is particularly pleasing to see the commitment to the development of public transport in South Australia. There are certainly some visionary elements to it. I always said about the tramline along King William Street that it was a waste of money unless there could be some more appropriate and valuable destination than simply going to the casino on North Terrace. It is good to see that the government has a plan in place for the development of the tramline to make it more useful and thus of better value for the taxpayers of South Australia.

It is good news to see the plans for electrification of the rail lines in Adelaide. Of course, this is where some questions need to be asked about where we are heading. In particular, we do not yet have a commitment to extend the rail line to Seaford and, ultimately, beyond Seaford. That is what we need. I have taken up that issue, although it does not directly have an impact on voters in the Marion and Reynella areas that I look after. However, it is a worthy thing for a very substantial part of South Australia's population. I suppose there is an indirect benefit to the people in my electorate, because if we have more commuters from south of Noarlunga travelling by train it will take pressure off the roads, and we certainly need that. Every day it seems that congestion around Adelaide is increasing, particularly in relation to trips into the city.

In that respect, I note that already there has been a shift to public transport as a result of petrol price rises. There are a couple of interesting aspects to that. It is interesting that, at the same time as more people are turning to public transport, there are price rises for those who wish to use public transport. I think that is a retrograde step. I realise that the bus services, in particular, have to pay for their fuel but, at the same time, if we are genuine about encouraging public transport as a solution to the rise in petrol prices and the ultimate crisis that may develop in relation to oil supply, we need to be serious about encouraging commuters.

When I see price rises with respect to public transport at a time like this I sometimes wonder whether the government is sincere in wishing for more commuters, because more commuters using public transport will put a strain on the system and it will require even greater public investment. I will give a couple of examples. I have seen many more people waiting at the local train stations on the Noarlunga line over the last year or so, and that demonstrates to me in very practical terms that more people are switching from car to rail where they can conveniently do so.

In that respect, the redevelopment of the Oaklands station was something of a fizzer. It was deemed an interchange whereby masses of people would alight from buses and cars and then catch the train into the city. It is nice to have a new railway station but, apart from that, all it has really been is two extra bus stops on Morphett Road, and those bus stops are adjacent to one of the busiest intersections in the south-western suburbs. So, it was not all that it could be.

The other vignette that I would like to offer relates to people I know who intended to catch the O-Bahn into the city earlier this week. They drove first to the Tea Tree Gully interchange, but every car park for the interchange was filled. Because they did not want to walk 1,000 metres or so to catch the O-Bahn, they thought it was just as quick and easy to drive to Klemzig or Paradise. So, they went to the Paradise interchange. After a quick drive through there they saw that every car park was taken.

One of the issues with the Paradise interchange is that, if the car park proper is full, people have to go quite some distance to find another suitable place to park a car. They then drove to Klemzig, and all the car parks there were full as well. So, they ended up driving into the city, anyway, and parking there. To me, that was a true story that demonstrated that there already needs to be greater investment in the existing rail infrastructure if we are going to have it work to the extent that people wish to use it.

Moving on from the rail issue, there are many positive aspects to the budget and we are seeing the results of the stream of GST money starting to assist the current Labor government. Because of the political cycle, the past two budgets have been more austere and we are starting now to see the use of that money with an eye to the 2010 election. It would not have been credible nor realistic to leave all of the big-ticket items to the budget just before the election, particularly those where there are long-range plans which have to be implemented if there is to be any sign of reality before the election hits. No doubt, next year, particularly in the current programs involving teachers, police, social workers, nurses and the like, there will be huge increases in next year's budget. I refer to this background to the current budget because it helps to explain why there is such a commitment to infrastructure. As I have said, that is positive.

However, I want to highlight one area which appears to have been neglected. With all the fuss about improvements to public transport and building super schools in the northern suburbs and so on, one area which seems to be neglected is the mental health sector. Last year, there was a significant allocation in the state budget and the government claimed that it was fully implementing the Cappo report which was sorely needed in the mental health sector. It does not seem to be the same sort of commitment in this year's budget to what is still just as much of a problem.

The detail may be there but it certainly needs examination in the committees that examine the budget because the budget papers, on the face of it, do not seem to provide the mental health sector what it needs. We have seen improvements over recent years—for example, the establishment of the Margaret Tobin Centre at Flinders Hospital—and it is great to see new premises like that operating, but to balance that we also have the impending closure of Glenside.

Leaving aside those big-ticket items, we also need to see development of more halfway houses, or what I call safe and secure accommodation, for that relatively small group of young men who are prone to violent or at least antisocial behaviour. I think we need to continue to have some sorts of institutions for people with mental illness for their own protection and that of others. They do not need to be big institutions like we used to have 50 to 100 years ago. They do not need to be institutions which lock people away out of sight, out of mind, but they do need to be small and transparent with around-the-clock staffing, so that people who rely on medication to maintain an equilibrium are able to enjoy a relatively open lifestyle, perhaps even with paid employment while being able to return to a safe haven of an evening. That is something that I will keep pushing for.

In summary, there is a lot of good in the budget. I have only highlighted a couple of areas. Some areas like mental health need close examination to see whether the government is really keeping up to its previous promises. On the whole, we welcome the GST stream of money which is finally seeing quite definite benefits for South Australians.

Dr McFETRIDGE (Morphett) (16:35): Budget speeches are always an interesting procedure to go through, because there are inevitably some good things in the budget, and there has to be, because you just cannot have $15 billion to spend and not be able to do something good. So, I am the first to acknowledge that.

I am still looking at the moment for some of the details of what I consider to have been fairly good announcements. I was quite excited about the transport announcements when I was first hearing about them—and I was hearing about them a long time before the press releases and the budget day speeches. I have been getting snippets for months now about what the government has been proposing. Unfortunately, my initial excitement and optimism has been dashed somewhat when it comes to looking at the detail because, with any budget, the devil is in the detail.

This is a budget where lots of opportunities have not been lost as such but have certainly been postponed in many ways. It is a budget where a lot more could have been done to reprioritise projects. The government cannot duck from the fact that it has the financial resources in its budget to fulfil a lot of what I would consider to be more high priority projects and some that it has put up as grand plans and visions. The staggering figure of $15 billion, compared with what we had in 2001-02 when we had about $8 billion is amazing and, as the member for Mitchell said, the GST income has been something which, although opposed by the Labor government initially, has really helped out.

The GST windfall, had it actually been put not into recurrent spending—and I am no economist, but I know you just cannot keep spending money on recurrent spending all the time—you have to think about infrastructure, and whether it is a house or a business or running the government infrastructure, you really do need to put money aside for new infrastructure. Nobody will say that infrastructure has been given the priority that it should have been over the last number of years by governments of all shapes and sizes, federal and state, and now there are opportunities with future funds in the federal sphere and infrastructure funds that we are seeing now.

There should have been money put aside in the state budget for future investment in South Australia. Had that been done, I am reliably informed, you would not be going on the never-never to pay for hospitals, you would not be having infrastructure that is planned 10 years out and then a lot of the spending is not in the current budget figures. You would be able to actually pay cash for it and that is a delightful position to be in if you can do it.

When I was running my own business as a vet practice, somebody said, 'You have to adopt the overdraft mentality.' That is okay, provided you have the income to pay for it but nobody wants to do that. You want to try to avoid that because, to me, interest is lost benefit to your business unless you are able to build the business through judicious judgments of when to borrow and when to clear debt.

What the government has been doing here unfortunately has been using windfall gains to pay recurrent expenditure and has not been using it to fund infrastructure benefits and we are now going into that overdraft. I remember back in the mid-eighties we were paying 23 per cent on the overdraft; interest rates are nowhere near like that now but let us hope that the government debt does not get to the stage where the AAA credit rating is put in jeopardy.

We should be able to afford building a hospital. We should be able to afford building a new transport network. We should be able to afford building a desalination unit without having to go deeper and deeper into debt, and I would encourage the government to look at their priorities and look at the way they are taking South Australia because the debt is increasing. By 2012 it will be about $2 billion, I am told.

The other interesting thing to look at in terms of how this government is managing the economy is to look at the revenue-raising efforts that the Commonwealth Grants Commission examine and report on each year. The Commonwealth Grants Commission ratios indicate that South Australia levied its tax revenue bases more severely than any other state or territory during 2006-07, which are the latest figures available, and according to tables put out there by the Commonwealth Grants Commission, South Australia was judged to have taxed more severely than the national average by 12.58 per cent.

There is lot of money coming in the GST. There have certainly been huge windfalls in land taxes and property taxes. I would have thought that the government would be able to have the cash income to manage the economy without going to the credit card, without going into debt, and certainly when you look at the facts and figures on various areas of income revenue for the state, one particular interest for me as shadow minister for transport is motor vehicle taxes.

In this year's budget they are predicted to be $435 million, and then if you add the GST from fuel it is about $1 billion. I understand that $26 million is brought into state coffers every time there is a 1¢ increase in the price of petrol. So there is a lot of extra money coming in at the moment, and with petrol prices roaring up, there are going to be some real issues for this government to face and that money that is coming in on GST is something that hopefully they will use very wisely and not just for recurrent payments.

When the budget first came down, I was getting snippets from all sorts of sources. Disaffected public servants would say, 'Have you heard this?' and they are just trying to do their job. The most bizarre one I got—which was very accurate, but the source was bizarre—was from a golf course from interstate where a friend of mine was playing golf with somebody there who said 15 new train/trams were being ordered.

The information is there. It is a bit like the Marj; we found out about the Marj a couple weeks before it came out. This transport initiative is one that has been out there for a little while and certainly I would love to be able to support it wholeheartedly but unfortunately it is not a plan, it is a proposal. There are so many things in here where the priorities are not quite right and where the figures do not stack up.

My initial excitement has certainly been tempered by what has actually come out. The minister today said that they had been investigating this since 2005 (and I am happy to correct it if that was wrong). The government has certainly been investigating it for a lot longer than that. I was actually shown original plans for electrification of the Adelaide rail system by a chap at Trott Park who phoned me up and said, 'Would you like to come and see these?' and there were pencil and ink drawings from 1923, if I remember correctly, and that included underground going up from the railway station up North Terrace and then up King William Street, almost shades of the MATS plan that we had back then.

The next plan that I have got hold of was done by the Director-General of Transport in June 1988. The conclusions for that one, and I quote from page 27:

The analysis shows that there is little justification on either economic or financial grounds for proceeding with electrification. The only economic case that could be made for switching to the electric would be if all the cost estimates obtained for this study were seriously an error and there was a doubling of the economic costs of oil in the 1990s.

Well, how true has that become. The cost of oil is going to put enormous pressure on public transport, and so having an integrated public transport plan—buses, cars, taxis, trains, trams—will be so important because people will not be able to afford to use their cars as frequently and as much as they would like in the future. With petrol prices predicted to go to $3 a gallon, according to one of the oil industry experts, it will be very interesting to watch how governments all over the world, and particularly here in South Australia, handle the issues.

Let us just talk about the 'transport vision' as the Treasurer called it. It is a vision. It is a long way off; you would need binoculars to see the end point to this vision, but at least it is an idea that is there. I certainly do not believe that it is a six-year plan, since 2005. The 1988 plan was there; it knocked it. There was a plan from 2004, and I am not sure who the minister was then, whether it was minister Wright or Conlon who was the transport minister then. That was done by the department of transport and urban planning. This was towards $30 million—the transformation of Adelaide's urban rail passenger system and new concept options. That was on 5 December 2004, and it discussed the electrification of rail and various options. That was another investigation. The latest was the Halcrow-Pacific investigation from March 2005; so there have been a number of plans.

I cannot remember the actual docket number, but I have seen a copy of the docket regarding the amount of money that was in the Whitlam federal Labor government policy. A submission was put to cabinet to provide money for electrification of rail. I think it was in 1983. I do not know where that money went. There was money for Adelaide and Brisbane. Brisbane obviously did its electrification; we did not. There have been some missed opportunities in the past by both sides in this place, but now the money is there and we have a proposal. But is it a plan? I am not so sure. I hope that a plan is being developed and that the government is able to really do something.

I have a lot of questions. I am happy for the minister to know which way I am going to go in the estimates committee. I have a lot of technical questions for this minister, and I hope that his advisers can give me the answers, because there are so many questions about the transport initiatives in this budget. I will go through some of them now and emphasise how a lot has been promised, but the delivery will be a long way away and the timelines and costings, in some cases, not there.

Last year, I think $121 million was announced for the resleepering of the Noarlunga train line and some parts of the Belair line. It has not started yet and I understand that it will not start until April next year. I am very disappointed that it is not yet underway. You cannot buy these sleepers off the shelf at Bunnings, we know that, but you are given warning about trends, you do know about depreciation, and you do know about the money you have to spend so that you can factor it into your budget expenditure and also into the ordering of materials.

In a moment I will talk about some of the forecasts that have been given to the government over the years about train and tram capacity. It is interesting to see how it apparently seems to be surprised by what it was told years ago—'Oh, we didn't know that it was going to happen.' The electrification of the Noarlunga line will not be completed until 2014. You cannot do it overnight, I know that, but I would have thought that you would be able to do it before then. There is no mention of extending the line to Seaford other than some land acquisitions in the Aldinga area. In the 2004 report by the department of transport and urban planning, there was talk of extending the line to Seaford and the budget requirements that would have to be put in place. So, the government was told about it then. It has been raised on numerous occasions since then.

The electrification of the Outer Harbor line will not commence until 2011 and then, as I understand it, it will go only to Port Adelaide. The Gawler line once again comes last with resleepering and track and rail upgrades not finished until mid-2014, and there will be an eight-year wait for electrification in 2016.

The north-south corridor is absolutely vital. There is no mention at all of the complete resleepering or the electrification of the Belair line. Obviously, the complications with freight coming through from the Eastern States is an issue, but there is no mention of getting freight off the metropolitan Adelaide railway lines other than the $3 million of federal money for a study that is in the brochure on the TransAdelaide website.

The relocation of the Adelaide rail yards is still in the budget and $157 million has been carried. It was supposed to be completed in June 2010. Now we see that it will not be finished until 2011—12 months later. I am just waiting to see what the actual cost of the soil remediation will be, because there is everything in that soil. There is diesel plume underneath, but above there is arsenic, PCBs, cyanide, and so many chemicals that it is almost like a toxic waste dump.

As for the trains, we have the oldest diesel rail fleet in Australia and yet we are keeping 50 of the old 3000 class trains, which can be converted to electric—no problems at all. You can rip out the motors because they are diesel electric and power them with overhead wires. They are being refurbished at the moment, but the refurbishment, as I understand it, involves taking out seats, giving them a bit of a tart up and recovering them. With respect to travelling by train into town from Gawler and Noarlunga, taking out the seats will not do much other than allow a few more people to stand in them. It will marginally increase the capacity.

One constituent who phoned my office to complain about overcrowding was told by the passenger service attendant, 'Lady, you buy a ticket; you don't buy a seat.' That is an atrocious attitude and I certainly hope that it is not one that the government shares. The government was warned in August 2005—going on three years now—when current capacity would be reached and maximised. For the Noarlunga, Outer Harbor and Belair lines, that is to happen in 2009-10, some of them in 2009. The Gawler line is due to reach capacity in 2008-09, so that is within six to 12 months. If you ask people on the trains now, they would say it is ahead of schedule. The government was warned about that. It is an indisputable fact that the government ignored those warnings, though, because it has done nothing to increase the capacity on the trains.

In terms of the new trams, it is interesting that the government says, 'Well, they have been too successful; they are overcrowded.' Yesterday morning, I came into parliament on one of the old rattlers. I left Glenelg at 7.20. It was not a coupled set, just a single tram, which surprised me because, unlike the new ones, the old ones can be coupled. By Beckman Street—not even halfway—it was at crush capacity; you could not move. What did I hear over the radio, because you can hear the radio transmissions on the old trams quite clearly? A conductor, presumably in a following tram, said, 'I'm retreating to the rear cab for my own safety because the passengers are becoming very angry at the overcrowding.' That situation is absolutely deplorable.

What is the government's answer to the increased demand on that line? It will lease four more Flexity Classics—exactly the same as we have in service. You cannot couple them together, so there will be four more trams whizzing backwards and forwards up and down on that line. That is not the answer.

In the 2004 report, the government was warned to expect a 50 per cent increase overall; 25 per cent with the new trams and 25 per cent with the extension; and in June 2005 it was warned to expect a 30 per cent increase with the introduction of new trams and a further 25 per cent increase with the extension to North Terrace. Where were the 8,000 Bee Line passengers going to go? I do not know. This is not a well thought out plan.

These are narrow bodied trams. We are going to have wide bodied trams running down Port Road. How many lanes? We do not know. How are they going to turn around at Bowden-Brompton? We do not know. How are the switching mechanisms going to work from standard gauge to broad gauge? Do they change the bogeys on the old trains to standard gauge? The switching is going to be so expensive, and then you are going to run diesel into Adelaide Railway Station. You are going to have to maintain the exhaust fans there. There are so many technical things that I hope to have answered in estimates.

I want this to succeed, but unfortunately I think it is a very ill thought out proposition that the government has put up. It is not something about which I can say, 'Good on you, government.' I wish I could say that, because the government has the money, the power and the opportunity, and South Australians deserve that.

I will go on to the $29 million for the new ticketing system in this budget. How is this government going to do it for $29 million? I hope it can. I will tell you what has happened. Queensland got it up and running at last for $137 million; not $29 million. New South Wales has just pulled the pin after spending $95 million on a $350 million tram ticketing program because it was not working. The best one—and I hope minister Conlon is listening to this—is Victoria, where the government did not tell the truth. It said that it spent $500 million, but the Auditor-General's report which came down in February states that the Victorian government spent $1 billion on its new ticketing system.

I hope that this government has some links with the Western Australian SmartCard ticketing system, which I understand is working satisfactorily. How well I am not sure, but I hope it is not like the TRUMPS motor vehicle registration system which was pulled in but which is still not working. How long do we have to wait down at Marion? I note that there is money in the budget to improve the Marion depot for the Department of Transport, so that you can register your car without having to wait half an hour. Let us just hope that a new ticketing system does work out. New buses: we need 50 new buses today; not 20 leased now and then 20 more and another 20 later. Those 50 new buses need to be integrated into the train system, but I do not see any real plans for that.

As for roads, most of the money that is being spent at the moment is federal money. There is very little money being spent on roads. I will have a lot more to talk about in estimates. I will have 2½ hours with the transport minister, and I look forward to a full and frank discussion on this because there needs to be a lot of detail given. I hope that he is willing to work with me and ensure that South Australians do get the transport plan they deserve, because they are certainly paying for it. One further indication of how much they are paying is that last year they paid over $40 billion in speeding fines alone; fifteen and a half million for travelling between 60 and 69. I do not condone it, but it is interesting to see where the money is going.

Time expired.

Mrs PENFOLD (Flinders) (16:55): According to the Premier on budget day:

Symbolism is so important in basically bringing the people with you.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, 'symbol' means 'a thing standing for or representing something else'; and 'symbolic' means 'a mark or a token'. Perhaps we could say 'an emblem or a gimmick', or, as what we were given in the subsequent budget was so expensive, we could say 'icons or monuments', although the $1.9 billion Marjorie Jackson-Nelson Hospital, which was obviously last year's icon, appears to be missing this year.

The Premier knew more than we did when he spoke, but it was prophetic, for what we were given in the subsequent budget was certainly more symbolic than nation building, as it should have been at a time when we need to build the foundation of the economy for the future prosperity of our state.

The government's profligacy in pursuing symbolic acts, using taxpayer funds for depreciating liabilities instead of income-earning job-creating assets, is nowhere more obvious than the $100 million allocated on a whim (after saying that they would not be providing funds) to an upgrade of AAMI Stadium. AAMI Stadium will continue to be a drain on taxpayers because of the government's short-term expediency and symbolism as opposed to long-term economic planning for the state's benefit. The lost opportunity cost of giving away this money for a stadium upgrade instead of using it for something worthwhile is not just limited to the $100 million, as there is a compounding effect caused by having to pay interest on this debt-funded gift at the current government rate; and that is forever. Interest for one year at 6 per cent is $6 million, but in 10 years this compounds to a massive $179 million.

This is money that could have been spent on health, education, or any of the other much needed infrastructure that underpins real economic development, jobs and prosperity for the future. Instead, the government announced the downgrade of 43 hospitals; eight of these in my electorate. The negative multiplier effect on the communities of these 43 small towns will spell their death knell as their populations spiral down. Of the total health budget of $3.8 billion, only $250 million is to be spent in regional South Australia. That is about one-seventh of the health budget, when we have about one-third of the population. The country people are angry and they have reason to be.

Symbolism does not build anything, let alone a nation, and it certainly has no compassion or community building elements. Nation building is the basis for prosperity, advancement, equality, innovation and the means to do all those things that lift the quality of life of ordinary people while helping those in less fortunate circumstances. Profitable income earning assets are the rock on which national prosperity is built, and it is the government's job to facilitate these by providing the necessary underlying infrastructure requirements.

Liberal premier Tom Playford knew this. He put in the underlying infrastructure that could not be afforded by the industries that followed and brought jobs, prosperity and self-esteem to the people. He understood the massive positive multiplier effect particularly in regional areas that the judicious use of taxpayers' funds expended by the government on infrastructure can have. He also understood the foolishness of only investing in the small part of the state where the majority of the people live: the city of Adelaide.

It was no surprise to hear the Treasurer in the first seconds of his budget speech talk of 'a significant transport investment program worth nearly $2 billion over the next decade' which will 'redefine our city's public transport network' and 'help South Australia increase its public transport weekday traffic to meet the State Strategic Plan target of 10 per cent by 2018'.

But there is nothing in this budget to provide the roads, railways, ports or airports to underpin the much touted mineral boom that will remain as exploration only, unless it has the underpinning infrastructure to value add and export. Only when the mining companies can value add and export will they be able to provide the millions that this government is expecting in royalties to pay for the expenditure it is undertaking. It is spending money before it has the income to pay the bills, despite having received billions of dollars more than it expected from GST income and the highest property taxes in Australia.

When something is called an investment it infers there will be a financial return of income to enable funding for this city transport plan and our health, education and criminal justice systems, to secure our water supplies, and for public sector funding and tax relief that the Treasurer talked about in the next paragraph of his speech.

The transport plan is not an investment but, rather, straight expenditure, as is the $10.3 billion or so to be spent across the public sector and invested in new capital projects over the next four years. Again, these are not investments that provide a financial return. They are very large debt-funded expenditures on long-term depreciating liabilities that will have to be replaced over time. They should be labelled as such so provision for the necessary income to pay for them is understood by the public. The provision of income must be allowed for in the budget for capital, interest and depreciation.

Much of this state's revenue comes from rural and regional South Australia, from agriculture, fishing, aquaculture, tourism and, latterly, mining. This is where much more of the state's revenue should be spent, rather than propping up uncompetitive private enterprises (such as car industries) or gimmicks which may induce a 'feel good' feeling (such as AAMI Stadium) and which have no substance. It should not be spent on symbols which may present a face that may be good to look at but which have no depth; for example, trams and solar panels to provide energy (that they already have) on government buildings and at the airport and showgrounds. This is a Labor forte—spending money without supporting the sources of the revenue.

Labor's ignorance and neglect in not providing underpinning infrastructure but expending money on depreciating liabilities is steadily running the state, once again, into debt. The Advertiser reported that Standard & Poor's has warned the Treasurer that the debt level is rising to the point where the state's AAA credit rating is at risk.

Thevenard port, despite being only 8.2 metres in depth and being able to take only small ships, still handles grain, salt, gypsum, and, soon, zircon and kaolin. The port has handled a greater tonnage than Port Lincoln in the past couple of years, although grain exports through both ports have been cut due to the drought. Nevertheless, exports through Thevenard will increase because of its closeness to mining opportunities and a proactive community.

It is proposed to deepen the port to 10.7 metres, although it should be deepened to 20 metres to enable it to take Cape size ships (which are now considered the industry standard) if we are to be competitive with the rest of the world. Cape bulker ships are now the world industry norm for the export of many minerals, including iron ore in particular.

The multiplier effect of spending money on this port (if it can be adequately deepened) would be enormous. The $150,000 ports plan for Eyre Peninsula on which I was briefed this morning provides no solutions to the ports issues. The full document will not even be released to the public—but the executive summary adds nothing anyway.

Centrex Metals' mining is imminent, with overseas contracts in place but no port available from which to export the minerals. The government appears to be bending over backwards to accommodate BHP Billiton, which seems to be the only company the Premier and his ministers can see. Port Bonython is the cheapest option for BHP Billiton for the location of the proposed 80 gigalitres per year desalination plant (according to a spokesman for the company). It is also proposed to have an oil refinery and a tank farm to hold fuel at Port Bonython. It could also be the major port for the export of iron ore, unless OneSteel allows mining companies to use Whyalla.

However, the associated port facilities—such as a jetty around two kilometres in length (longer than Port Germein in its heyday)—will be expensive for a state government, irrespective of what or how much private funding is involved. Instead a long-term sustainable, environmentally friendly future could be a fact with Thevenard near Ceduna and another port at Cape Hardy on the eastern side of Eyre Peninsula between Port Lincoln and Port Neill being used as a multiuser export port capable of handling the largest cape bulker ships.

Both ports will be needed to handle the amount and variety of ores that will come from the area. The Western Australian port of Esperance has been extended already and is now looking at further expansion in order to handle the tonnages companies want to export through that port; and I expect a similar need on Eyre Peninsula. Adequate and appropriate planning now would ensure that the whole state benefits from our minerals resources.

The other major component associated with mining is water. Here again, symbolism, inaction and ignorance and a lack of concern for the environment, sustainability and climate change are the actions of this government. This is evident in the government's support for BHP Billiton's proposal to site a desalination plant at Port Bonython. The saga of Labor's bungling continues in that we now find that this plant will not produce the potable water espoused to supply the Iron Triangle towns and Eyre Peninsula.

Yesterday the Treasurer advised that it may be possible to spend another $50 million for additional purification. This can be added to the dumb decision to extend the Morgan-Whyalla pipeline from Iron Knob to Kimba at a cost of $48.6 million to deliver 1.4 gigalitres of water from the suffering River Murray and away from those whose livelihoods depend on the Murray. Some $100 million will be squandered, while private enterprise was stopped from building solar thermal desalination plants at Ceduna and Port Augusta, which could have provided water at no cost to taxpayers or the environment as the salt was to be used by Cheetham Salt rather than be returned to the sea.

The National Party's Minister for Water Security, backed by her fellow Labor ministers, justified this pipeline on the Eyre Peninsula by saying that the water came from unused water allocation. Now, if the allocations were previously unused it meant that the water was not coming from the Murray, but now that they are being used the water is being taken out of the Murray. I am pleased to see some people are beginning to wake up to the disaster that a desalination plant at Port Bonython, with the hyper-saline waste going back into Spencer Gulf, would be.

A desal plant at Cockburn Sound in Western Australia supplying Perth with water has been limited to one-sixth capacity on at least two occasions recently when the oxygen in the sea fell to dangerously low levels. A scarcity of available oxygen spells death to sea life. Cockburn Sound has greater sea movement than in the top of Spencer Gulf, therefore the potential damage to the marine environment must be considerably greater in Spencer Gulf, which also has regular dodge tides. Whyalla residents are at last realising that the giant cuttlefish, which occur in aggregations here like nowhere else in the world, are threatened. One may define the limits of a sanctuary. However, the salt movement in the sea cannot be contained by imaginary boundaries. No-one knows at what salt concentration cuttlefish stop breeding and start the road to extinction.

The top of the gulf is the nursery for many species of fish, including prawns. The potential to wipe out the multimillion dollar prawn fishery is one of the many acts of unsustainability that the Minister for Sustainability and Climate Change and his government are pushing. Once upon a time there was a very profitable prawn fishery in Gulf St Vincent. We do not want to see the same problems in Spencer Gulf that occurred there. Surely it makes more sense to avoid environmental disasters than attempt to repair them after the event. In any case, once species such as the giant cuttlefish become extinct, they cannot be replaced from somewhere else.

The Minister for Water Security and her Labor colleagues were dragged kicking and screaming to agree to a desalination plant to supply some of Adelaide's water, thus reducing the take from the River Murray. We may see something happen on that score if we live long enough. The Cockburn Sound plant in Western Australia, which is similar to the proposed Port Stanvac plant, cost under $500 million. However, the South Australian plant is estimated to cost about $1.5 billion—three times as much by the time it comes on stream. The difference is that private enterprise became involved in Western Australia, and the South Australian plant is wholly the project of the government-owned monopoly, SA Water—the same body which prevented the desalination plants proposed for Eyre Peninsula and which approved the $48.6 million pipeline to Kimba to bring water to Eyre Peninsula from the River Murray.

The two wind farms on Eyre Peninsula produce more power than can be used in the region. The additional wind or solar energy plants can provide the power for desalination as well as for the mining. The government should immediately facilitate the desalination plant at Ceduna, provided that the company (or another one) can be induced to take that up again. The original company has now gone to Queensland where it is building desalination and solar power plants. The Acquasol project at Port Augusta should be facilitated as a matter of urgency. A third desalination plant at Cathedral Rocks to use excess power from that wind farm should be built. The sea's action and energy along that coast is sufficiently dynamic to disperse waste without damage to the environment.

The environmentally damaging plant proposed for Port Bonython should be scrapped. The pipeline to Kimba can be reversed and the excess desalinated water from Eyre Peninsula can be sent through to Whyalla. The old world is disappearing and new industries are being born to meet the crisis of change, whether the change comes from global warming, the depletion of fossil fuels or some other cause. Addressing this future requires action, not a few symbols set up to anaesthetise the masses. To this end, The Advertiser article of 10 June 2008 titled 'Carnegie Mellon—An Expensive Failure' is enlightening. Again, Labor goes for headline-catching bursts without long-term realisation of value. Why spend millions of dollars importing overseas organisations when we already have the infrastructure and can compete at a world level right here and now?

Again, it is more of the symbolism that this government loves. Instead of trumpeting our successes on a world scale or trying to lift us to the world level, the Premier imports someone else's public profile as a symbol. The budget is a mishmash of empty symbolism coupled with a renouncement of projects that are supposedly already in the pipeline. This includes the redevelopment of the Ceduna Hospital. That may or may not happen, going on past actions of this Labor state government. The announcements cover the next four years thus giving Labor time to forget this and gradually drop it off the agenda.

There have been many plans over the years for the redevelopment of the Ceduna Hospital, but nothing has happened yet. What does this Labor government do? It gives us symbols, meetings, conferences, seminars, media releases and plenty of talk but no action. This state's water crisis is a microcosm of this government's stupidity, its lack of financial and economic nous and, most of all, its sophistry in attempting to explain away its inadequacy. A dictionary gives the meaning of 'sophistry' as a subtle, tricky, clever but generally false method of reasoning. This budget is full of it.

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (15:13): Now that the Minister for Health is in the chamber, I will take the opportunity to mention a couple of health matters which I had not intended to speak about. For a longer version, I suggest the minister go to the grievance debate from yesterday when I spoke for a whole five minutes about health. However, I will give him a very brief overview of what happens in country hospitals. The minister's report says that the Millicent Hospital has a 50 per cent occupancy because it has 35 beds and an average of only 17 are occupied. The reality is that his department funds the Millicent Hospital for only 28 beds, so there are seven beds which cannot be counted. Just like he has wards at the Royal Adelaide Hospital locked away with no nurses and no staff, the exact same thing happens in country hospitals, and, if you are unaware, minister, your bureaucrats are snowing you when they tell you the occupancy rates of country hospitals. They are just snowing you.

If you are aware of it, then you are trying to snow the public. That is the reality; that is what is happening out there. Also, minister, your GP Plus hospitals cater for an overnight stay. If you are going to be there any longer than overnight you are shipped out. If you have a medical condition that will require more than an overnight stay (and this was argued on the front steps today), in some hospitals it will cost more in transfers to get people down the road for an hour, an hour and a half, via ambulance to the next hospital than it would to keep them in some of these small country hospitals.

Minister, you are being snowed, and you are snowing the public of country South Australia. Do not for one moment think that the public of country South Australia will walk away from this issue—and this is why the people of Bordertown in my electorate are so up in arms about this—because they know exactly what happens when you downgrade the services in hospitals. You lose your doctors and GPs, and that is what the minister failed to understand in the answers to the questions that he gave here today.

I know, minister, that you are not so thick that you are not aware of that. I know that you are not that thick. I hope I am right on that, minister, I really do, because some of your colleagues are thick enough, and I would not pay them that compliment. One of them is the Treasurer. He is leading this state into disaster, and I will explain why. This is his seventh budget, and he has been doing it for a number of years.

Members will be well aware that I call this borrow and spend. That is what this Treasurer does: borrows and spends. He has had an out of control budget now for six years and he is trying to get it back into control through huge borrowings. This has been coming for years, and we on this side have been talking about this for years. It is of no surprise to us. The unfortunate thing is that when the public of South Australia wakes up to the spin that emanates from this government and understands how thick this Treasurer is, it will be too damn late. We have been there before, and we are heading back there again.

I refer to Budget Paper 3, page 1.1, 'Fiscal strategy and budget priorities', where it states:

Fiscal strategy

The government's primary fiscal targets are to achieve:

at least a net operating balance in the general government sector in every year.

This Treasurer used to say, 'We will have a budget surplus', but he did not say, 'We will use net operating balance.' He used to say, 'We will use net lending' or 'We will use the cash measure', one of the two measures that most governments use. But, suddenly, when they ran into a deficit, which they did a number of years ago, he changed his tactic and said, 'We will use the net operating balance figure', because he can get away with it a bit longer. There are only two dot points in the government's key fiscal strategies. The second dot point over the page states:

net lending outcomes that ensure the ratio of net financial liabilities to revenue continues to decline towards that of other triple-A rated states.

They are fine words. That is what this Treasurer is hoping to do, so he prints that in his budget on the second page, hoping that no-one will read any further—they will flick the page and read something else.

The reality is that he is not achieving that. That is not what is happening. If you study the table below, you realise that the ratio of net financial liabilities to revenue is going up. And you have to read another whole page. You have to keep reading and reading, almost to the bottom of page 1.3, where he admits:

The ratio of general government sector net financial liabilities to revenue is forecast to increase across the forward estimates reflecting the growth in net debt associated with high levels of investment in capital projects.

I will talk at some length about the high level of investment in capital projects, because even this budget does not actually put aside the sort of money that the government has claimed it is spending in its TV ads (in its daily diatribe of spin). Certainly, the last few budgets do not, and I will come back to that in a moment.

One of the things we have continued to highlight on this side of the house is that this budget has been out of control because this Treasurer has been unable—I do not know whether he is unwilling but he is certainly unable—to control the growth in the public sector and, in my opinion, that is what is causing the majority of his problem. We know that the public sector has grown enormously under this government, and we know it has grown enormously in an unbudgeted way. We know that the government has budgeted to put on some more doctors, nurses and police officers. We know that, and we accept that: that is part of the budgetary process.

This government has allowed the growth in the public sector to balloon and explode. We continue to have a public sector where the percentage of our budget spent on employee expenses is considerably above the Australian average. There is only one state which is above the South Australian rate of expansion. In South Australia 46.7 per cent of our total budget expenses is spent on employee expenses. The only state that is above that is New South Wales, where it is 49.5 per cent.

I do not think we should be trying to copy New South Wales, to be honest. My understanding is that New South Wales, on most economic measures, is the one state that really has been dragging back the national averages. South Australia is up there but, because of our relative size, we do not have much impact on the national averages. But we are certainly right up there and, in fact, even worse than New South Wales on most of the economic indices.

In Victoria that figure is 38.5 per cent, in Queensland it is 38.8 per cent, and in Western Australia it is 40.4 per cent—considerably below South Australia. That is why those states have been able to invest in infrastructure over the years and have not had to rely on what this Treasurer is going to rely on over the next couple of years, and that is large borrowings.

I wish the average man in the street would understand that the net financial operating balance surpluses that this Treasurer is claiming are there only because they are underpinned by large borrowings. In the next budget period (2008-09) we will have a net operating balance of $160 million. That sounds pretty good, and the Treasurer goes out there and puffs out his chest and says, 'Look how good I am.' Fiscal rectitude, I think he calls it.

To achieve that, he happens to be borrowing $548 million; half a billion dollars. It is a little more the next year and a little more again the following year and then it drops back to $460 million the year after. That is $2 billion, in round figures, that this Treasurer will be borrowing in the next four years. And this budget does not even list all the liabilities that are accruing to the state. The liabilities that are being accrued are not listed because of the DPP contracts which have already been signed and which will be signed over the next few years.

I heard the Minister for Water Security on the radio this morning talking about water security (and I want to talk more about that). She suggested that this government is investing $3 billion in water security in South Australia. I can tell the house that the $3 billion is not listed in this budget. There is $96 million for some initial works on a desalination plant for Adelaide south of Adelaide, and that is the only infrastructure to provide water security to this state that appears in this budget. However, the Minister for Water Security is out there on the airways claiming that this government is investing $3 billion. Well, it ain't in the budget: it is a falsehood. When you add those sorts of numbers to the figures that appear in the budget, if the government can ever purchase those things, it gets even worse.

Let me talk a little more in depth about water, because I think water is the main game in town at the moment. The government has failed. I will be repeating myself a little, because this has gone on for a long time and the government keeps making the same mistakes. This government decided some years ago that it would not spend money on water infrastructure—that it would pray for rain—and it has continued that policy. That is the key policy of the government; pray for rain. That has been its policy for at least the last three years, and it continues in this budget.

We are currently experiencing a drought across south-eastern South Australia, low flows in the River Murray system and low flows through the hills catchments into our hills storages, and this low rainfall event has been with us since at least 2003. I can understand the government's not noticing that for a year or two—and, to be quite honest, South Australia was insulated from it for the first couple of years.

However, in 2005 the then minister (who happens to be the current Minister for Health) released the Waterproofing Adelaide policy. That policy document indicated that, under drought conditions, Adelaide would run out of water not today but some time last year. There is a graph on page 14, I think, if anyone cares to look at the document, which shows Adelaide's water supply under drought conditions and Adelaide's water demand, and the trend lines cross in 2007. However, with continuing drought conditions, the government did nothing and it continues to do nothing.

What the government has done (and this is the problem for South Australians with this government) is to go out week after week and announce major projects, and that puts the journalists off the scent. It keeps them at bay, and every time they raise the issue the government says (as the Minister for Water Security said this morning on ABC Radio), 'But, boys, we are spending $3 billion on water infrastructure.' Show me the money, minister—because the only thing that is available from her government is press releases. I can pick up the press releases and I can read what the minister tells people she will do, but she is not doing it. She has refused to do it and she continues to pray for rain.

Let me run through some other matters—and this was just over 12 months ago, at the time of last year's budget. Members will remember that at that time the government still had not come on board with the idea of building a desalination plant for Adelaide but it had started to say, 'We are building the biggest desalination plant in the southern hemisphere in the Upper Spencer Gulf.' Both the Minister for Water Security and the Premier have been guilty of saying 'we' are building this huge desalination plant.

The reality is that the Deputy Premier was literally flushed out when he had to admit that the government was not building it—in fact, the government did not even know whether it was going to be associated with BHP. He did not even know whether the water coming out of BHP's proposed desalination plant would be of drinking quality. He made a ministerial statement yesterday in this house and said, 'We have been involved in these discussions since 2006.' That is two years ago, and he still does not know what is happening or what BHP's proposals are. For two years he has had the opportunity to go out and say to the people of South Australia, 'We are building this huge desalination plant.' This government has kept running out and saying that, knowing full well that it was not the truth and it was not their intention.

I cannot believe that the Deputy Premier has been talking with BHP Billiton for two years and that he found out only a week or a fortnight ago that the water produced from its proposed plant in the Upper Spencer Gulf would not be suitable for SA Water—because that is what he has told the house in the last week or two. If the Deputy Premier has been talking with BHP Billiton for two years and has only just found that out, I suggest that the government gets someone else to talk to BHP Billiton, because the Deputy Premier—what did I say he was earlier?

Mr Pisoni: Incompetent.

Mr WILLIAMS: 'Incompetent' is a damn good word, because it describes him very well. I note that BHP Billiton has released a press statement on this matter, because I think it has been a bit miffed by the Deputy Premier. It has expressed some surprise at this matter being raised in the parliament and the Deputy Premier's comments. For goodness sake, someone over there give the Deputy Premier a tap on the shoulder and tell him it does not matter that he would not be able to get a job in the private sector because it is time for him to leave the public sector because we are sick of him here.

As to the Mount Bold reservoir, at budget time last year, on 7 June from memory, The Advertiser carried a major article about how the Premier and the water security minister had been there with the TV cameras, etc. They had all the print stuff mocked up about how they were going to increase Mount Bold so that The Advertiser could print it. Yet, 12 months later it is off the agenda. Again, here is this government going out and telling the public what it wanted the public to believe it was going to do when it obviously had no intention of doing it.

That is the problem with this government: it keeps telling fibs. It goes out and says, 'This is what we are going to do. We are spending all this money. We are going to save you,' but it has no intention of doing it. Mount Bold is not happening now. The water security minister is now saying that they are going to double the capacity in the Hills somewhere but she is not sure where. The Deputy Premier is still saying that they will do something at Mount Bold. It is total confusion but no intention. It is an $850 million project, yet we were advised very shortly after that announcement that you would not do that job at Mount Bold for under $1.3 billion. That, I believe, is the same advice that was given to the government shortly after it came out with its presumptuous statement about Mount Bold. That is why it has disappeared.

As to the desal for Adelaide, where is it? At last there is $96 million in the budget. I repeat that I was in Spain a few weeks ago where I spoke to some of the companies that manufacture major desal plants around the world and I visited a desal plant being constructed in Barcelona. I talked to a lot of water people in various parts of Spain. I put to one of these big companies the question: how long would it take you to build a desal plant in Adelaide? This company said, 'We are very interested in Australia. We are shortlisted to build a new desal plant in Perth. That is not far from you. We want to build our business in Australia.' I asked how long it would take to build it. They said 18 months to two years tops, including ordering the materials.

What does our water security minister say? Six years. Why does she say six years? So that she can go on radio and say that she is spending $3 billion when she does not have the authority to spend $3 billion and when she has no damn intention of spending $3 billion. That is what is happening. That is why this budget is yet another dud from a dud Treasurer and that is why South Australia continues to go backwards under this government. That is why, in less than two years, the people of South Australia will pass judgment, and I sincerely hope they get it right this time because I do not think they can afford to go much further with this government and this Treasurer.

Mr GRIFFITHS (Goyder) (17:33): It is my pleasure to follow my colleagues who have so eloquently put their perspective on the budget.

Mrs Geraghty: That's not what we say.

Mr GRIFFITHS: My position might not be agreed on by all sides but it is from my side. I congratulate the Leader of the Opposition on his contribution earlier today. I think he certainly expressed the thoughts of many South Australians who are not necessarily happy with the budget that was brought down some 12 days ago.

I want to talk about a lot of things in my contribution—I will not touch on health just yet; perhaps I will talk about that at the end—and I want to recognise the fact that in the 27 months or so that I have been a member of the house this is the third time that a budget has been presented. Each time I have taken it, I have tried to read as much of it as I possibly can in order to understand it all and I have tried to get a grasp of it. It is a challenge; there is no doubt about that. Anything that controls the revenues and expenditure of $13.5 billion is an enormous amount and it takes a lot of work to put together, but you have to make sure you get it right, too. So, I want to go through a few things from our perspective that we feel are not as good as they could be.

I have a lot of concerns about what the future financial position of South Australia will be. The Treasurer stands up all the time and talks about the AAA credit rating and the need to preserve it and what he has done over his six years in government—his seven budgets that he has presented and the fact that the budget is always in surplus. The problem is that the method that he uses to determine whether it is in surplus or deficit is not what he said he was going to do initially.

In 2002, the Treasurer stated that Labor would use net lending as the measure of its budget results. But now, conveniently, because it has become quite difficult to maintain a surplus—and, in fact, it is in deficit by this proposed budget of $548 million—he has gone to the net operating opportunity which shows a surplus of $160 million. The other method of measuring financial performance is cash deficit. Even the budget papers themselves identify the fact that the cash deficit will be $530 million for the 2008-09 financial year. The net lending deficit and the cash deficit both identify that over the forward projections of the budget the deficit figure will be something like $2 billion in total. That has to be a concern for every South Australian out there who worries about the future financial viability of their state.

I want to talk about revenues. When the Liberal Party unfortunately lost the February 2002 election and Labor came in, the budget of the state then was a little over $8 billion. Now we find that in 2008-09 it will be $13.3 billion but it has actually increased by $4.7 billion—just imagine what that capacity can do. The question that other members of the opposition and I am asked continually is: where can we actually see the benefit of that increase in revenue? People in regional South Australia are not seeing it and many of the people in metropolitan South Australia are not seeing it either, so a lot of questions are to be asked.

People do not mind paying taxation when they can see the benefit but there have to be obvious signs of it. They do not want to continually hear about visions, scoping projects, pre-feasibilities and feasibility studies. They want to hear about action on the ground. They want to see that action on the ground and they want to see whether their money is being spent appropriately and whether they have the chance to benefit as a society and a community from that. We are not sure whether that has actually happened.

From 2002-03 to 2007-08, the government will actually collect a massive $3.7 billion more than it expected to receive. GST revenues make up $2.1 billion of that; other state taxations make up $1.6 billion. Just imagine if there had been a bit of forward vision like that shown by the previous Howard federal government where funds had been put aside into future funds to actually pay for liabilities and, importantly, to actually have funds there to build our nation. As a state, South Australia has had this opportunity, but it has not taken it up. It needs that sort of vision; it needs to ensure that financial responsibility exists.

This is of great concern to me having come into this place from a local government background where every dollar really had to be accounted for quite stringently. If you did not expend what you said you would and if you did not complete projects that you were going to do, you had to report against that and be accountable to the community against that all the time, but now, it seems to me, it is a case of income being underestimated and expenditure overestimated.

That creates the capacity suddenly to find dollars in the budget to actually do some additional work, but it leads me to ask: where is the budgeting responsibility? Where is the fiscal control that ensures that, when a budget is published—and an enormous amount of work goes into it—it truly does represent the state's vision over that 12 month period and over the forward estimates period of an additional three years?

I have asked that question of the Auditor-General during his presentations to the Economic and Finance Committee and it has just surprised me. The previous Auditor-General actually submitted a statement in his 2006-07 report, as follows:

Net operating balance surpluses were achieved after revenue windfalls (unbudgeted) allowed for funding of initiatives and expenditure pressures to be addressed...This implies a need for very strong control and reporting over future spending.

The Auditor-General has raised this point and, certainly, members on this side of the house raise this point all the time that they want to see financial controls in place, but it does not appear as though it is getting any better.

It is amazing to me that we had a budget adopted only 12 months and one week ago which showed, I believe, a $30 million surplus. The Mid-Year Budget Review upgraded that to a $90 million surplus—remembering also that expenditure had increased by, I think, $450 million during that financial year—but now we find that the estimate result for 2007-08 as included in the budget papers for 2008-09 showed that it was going to be a surplus in the current financial year of $373 million, a 12-fold increase on what was shown in the original budget that was set down only 12 months ago.

This really does demonstrate that the Treasurer is not listening to what the Auditor-General said in his 2006-07 report and that we need to ensure that things improve in the future. I can give you an assurance that a Liberal government from 21 March 2010 would do that.

Credit rating has to be a concern for all South Australians. As I mentioned before, the Treasurer stands up with great pride and talks about the AAA credit rating. We on this side know that our AAA credit rating was only able to be achieved through some amazing decisions being made in the period between 1993 and 2002 after a Liberal government inherited a disgraceful state financial position primarily caused by State Bank debt where you had $11.6 billion in liabilities and $3.6 billion of that related to the State Bank. That created some enormous challenges but, through hard work and difficult decisions, it was improved enormously.

We now have a credit rating that I think is seriously exposed. We do know that the ratio of South Australia's net financial liabilities to revenue in this budget paper is identified as being 70.4 per cent. That is clearly in the upper echelons when you compare it against all other states. The budget papers identify that Tasmania is the next highest with 54.2 per cent of net financial liabilities to revenue, and it is interesting to note that Tasmania's credit rating is AA+. It is not AAA; it is AA+. A reduction in credit rating creates additional costs associated with borrowings. The Treasurer certainly cannot afford that because we know that borrowings are projected to increase for government debt out to, I think, $1.98 billion by 2011-12.

There is a lot of pressure on this budget. The government has probably brought forward projects that it did not want to do yet in answering initiatives that have been announced by the opposition. That has forced them to go to areas that they probably would have wanted to preserve until later in the electoral cycle, but it has created some great challenges. We know from answers by the Treasurer to questions in the house on pressures on investments that the state is in for a bit of a rocky ride on its $13 billion of funds that are under investment. We have done some sums just as they relate to Funds SA. The prediction is that that will probably lose $351 million. Admittedly, these estimates are two weeks old, but we also know that the pressure on the stock market over that period has actually been even more pronounced with a reduction in the market. Let us hope it picks up, because, for South Australia's future, it needs to improve.

The Motor Accident Commission again projected figures two weeks ago that it might be losing $140 million, while WorkCover, through its loss of investments, was another $41 million. In total, that was $532 million in loss of investments. The pressure is only going to get tighter.

I have talked about net debt being $11.6 billion in 1993 down to $3.2 billion when the election of 2002 handed government to Labor, but we know now that, with government debt and non-financial public sector debt, it is actually going to be $5.2 billion by the end of the 2011-12 financial year. That is amazing when you consider that state government debt as it currently stands is, I believe, about $82 million but, again, enforcing the fact that with the borrowing program that will be in place—and many members of the opposition have voiced their concern about the borrowing program by the Treasurer—it will be $1.98 billion by 2012 that the government itself owes as a debt.

I am a believer in debt to some degree. I have, personally, a financially conservative nature, but I understand that debt really does need to be in place to fund important infrastructures. However, you have to look at the capacity of the revenues to actually pay for it. You have to look at the capacity of the property owners and the taxpayers in South Australia to pay for it, too. Budgets are predicted to improve. I know the Leader of the Opposition is quoted quite often as saying that over the forward estimate periods this government will be bringing in by 2011-12 something like $15 billion per year. That is $15 billion out of the pockets of taxpayers in South Australia and Australia, and you need to make sure you spend it appropriately.

Another issue on which the Leader of the Opposition has been quite outspoken is this $3.7 billion in windfall revenues over the last seven years. Of that amount, $2.1 billion comes from GST. Labor did not want GST. The Premier was quoted on 5DN in 2001 as saying it was a 'lemon deal' for South Australia. It has turned out to be something very different from that because it has actually given the state revenues that he could not have imagined. It has allowed—

Mr Pisoni interjecting:

Mr GRIFFITHS: The member for Unley tells me that it is sweeter than lemonade. That is a great term, I like that. But to have that $2.1 billion that you have not considered as part of each budget cycle and then blow it does nobody any good. A lot of the additional amount of $1.6 billion that is coming from South Australian taxpayers has come from property taxation. I want to highlight one aspect of this. I am rather surprised when I look in the 2008-09 financial year budget and find that land tax from private property will increase from $223 million to $306 million. That is $83 million extra in one financial year and an increase of 37.5 per cent, and it has not hit the airwaves. I have not heard of people up in arms about it. Obviously, when the bills start coming out it will be very different.

The government and the opposition reacted quite interestingly about four years ago to land tax increases then, and this affected everybody who had coastal properties, second homes or investment properties, and it puts a lot of pressure on the economy to pay for this. To increase it by 37.5 per cent in one year is amazing. And to put it down purely to the fact that valuation increases justify it is not appropriate either. There is always an ability to adjust the rate to which land tax is levied to create some savings for the people who are paying the bill. These people will start to scream.

We have already started to get letters from people who are concerned about the fact that the consolidation legislation, which went through last year, reduces the ability to minimise land tax by holding lands in different names and companies. That was intended to create additional revenue of $5 million. We have heard some amazing stories. Since that was brought in, the land tax of one property owner in the metropolitan area, who contacted the opposition, has increased from $14,000 to $124,000. That is just one of many stories that people across the state will be telling. Interestingly, from the 2000-01 financial year through to 2008-09, taxes on properties increased from $731 million to $1.577 billion, or 116 per cent—amazing.

I acknowledge the fact that an adjustment has been made to stamp duty costs for first home buyers. I enforce the fact that first time buyers made up only 30 per cent of the market in the last financial year, compared to 20 per cent six years ago. The pressures out there on young people to buy their first home are immense. They want to live a lifestyle and, importantly, they also want to have assets. They rely very heavily upon their parents to support them. Parents will want to start spending their inheritance pretty soon. They do not want to leave it all to their kids; they want to make sure that they too have a good lifestyle.

Very large property valuation increases are making it extremely hard on young people. These are the young people we want to keep in South Australia. It is making it very hard for our young people to come up with that money to buy that first home. Let's hope that it gets better very soon, because everybody should be entitled to that right. We want to make sure that people have great careers in South Australia. We want to make sure that people have the opportunity to have a family in South Australia, to live here, and enjoy the lifestyle that we have enjoyed over our time. But let's make sure—

Mr Pederick interjecting:

Mr GRIFFITHS: The member for Hammond says that you might have to live in the city for that, and I will refer to this later. Our definition of what this state budget does for regional people is that it actually abandons them, and I got a bit angry about discussions about country health. But we will come to that a bit later.

On employment growth, the minister will stand up and say that there are 777,800 people working in South Australia, and 15 continuous months of employment growth. But the reality is that, if South Australia actually kept up with employment growth as it occurs across the nation, there would be another 25,900 people in employment. We currently have 41,100 people unemployed, including 4,000 young people between the ages of 15 and 19 who are out there looking for a job and cannot find one, and have to put up with 25 per cent youth unemployment rates.

The unemployment rate overall in South Australia is 5 per cent. If we had managed to keep up our employment growth opportunities as they related to all of the nation that additional 25,900 people in work would have meant that our unemployment would have been down probably with the rate that Western Australia now enjoys. Let's not talk about mining booms; let's talk about mining discoveries and the research that they are doing. Let's actually make sure that jobs are created in the state and that we get flow-on effects from that because we certainly need it.

I want to highlight unfunded superannuation liabilities for a while. The 2006-07 financial year result for unfunded super was $5.075 billion. At the end of this current financial year 2008 this is predicted to be $6.91 billion. That is an $1.84 billion increase in one financial year. I know that there have been some negative returns from investments; I understand that, but suddenly we have this impost on superannuation liabilities that will be a noose South Australia's neck for the next 40 years.

I am told that there is a plan in place, and there has been for some time since the Liberals came in '93, to fully fund superannuation by 2034. I know also from looking at the budget papers that superannuation liabilities will be around the $6.9-$7.1 billion mark out over the forward estimates; so it is a great challenge for the Treasurer to ensure that that becomes funded.

I want to focus very briefly in my closing minutes on public sector blow-outs. There is a variety of figures out there about the increased numbers in the public sector. The Commissioner of Public Employment has referred 17,000 additional public sector employees and the budget papers that we have been able to review identify 12,085. The Treasurer has talked about 9,287, which itself creates a concern that these three people who are providing information through to the budget cannot actually agree on a figure.

I know that there has been an increase in nurses, teachers, doctors and police officers. The Premier quite often quotes the additional 699 doctors who have been employed in the state. But if you deduct those people from the increase in public service numbers, even by the Treasurer's own figure of being in the lower estimates, there are still nearly 5, 800 people who were not originally budgeted for. So let's actually make sure that things are controlled a bit.

In my closing remarks I want to refer very briefly to country health. I will talk about this at later opportunities too. It was fantastic today to see 1,000 people out on the steps of Parliament House. Many of those people had very little warning about the effects of the country health care plan announced on 5 June. They did not have much of an opportunity to galvanise public support, but those people and a lot of key people from all the regions of South Australia made sure that a core nucleus was aware of it. They organised to fill buses and cars to come down to the city, and for some people at tremendous cost and time impost, but they all wanted be here because they want to fight for a service that is important to them.

I had the opportunity to speak to many Yorke Peninsula people who were out the front and I commend them for the effort that they have made. They are people who have a passion for community life in general. I was not surprised when I saw so many people from Yorke Peninsula because I know that, if a serious issue comes up—and hospitals are the most important for them—they will fight with a passion for it, and they are an example to many of us in this place.

It is important that we in opposition ensure that the government is accountable on the Country Health Care Plan because it is causing enormous concern. I am trying to ensure that information is out there with people and, on that note, I thank the Minister for Health for ensuring that a senior officer within Country Health is available to address a public meeting in Yorketown within my electorate on Tuesday of next week. That meeting is going to be an interesting one. I am hopeful that at least several hundred people will attend. I have chosen Yorketown strategically because it is losing its obstetrics services as at the end of June, as I understand it.

The Hon. J.D. Hill interjecting:

Mr WILLIAMS: Not both. Yes, the minister confirms that he believes that is what the local doctor wants to do. I know one 70-year old doctor who does not want to do any more, but there is a 62-year old who wants to continue.

Time expired.

Mr PISONI (Unley) (17:53): In my contribution to the debate on the Appropriation Bill, I will spend time talking about my electorate. Health and education are important issues, and a lot of teachers and health workers live in my electorate. I am sure that many of them were out on the steps of Parliament House yesterday and today protesting about the crisis in the education and health sectors, and I would like to let them know that I share their concerns. However, there are two other concerns in the seat of Unley, one of which is the encroachment of urban consolidation, and this budget is all about urban consolidation.

In the last couple of months in this house we have seen three members of the Labor government endorse the policies of urban consolidation, despite the fact that they challenged my claims at the last election that they were the party for urban consolidation. We heard the member for West Torrens saying that everyone has the right to subdivide their land. We heard the member for Mawson say that urban consolidation is a good thing, and the member for Norwood, of all people, said that urban consolidation is a good thing for her seat.

We know the views of the replacement candidate for the member for Norwood at the next election, Robert Bria, the mayor, who is going to demolish three historic homes at Linde park because he says that they are not in keeping with the area and that they are holding up progress. Urban consolidation is a big issue for those of us in the historic suburbs of Unley, Norwood, St Peters and North Adelaide. We feel that we have a proud heritage in South Australia and we need to ensure that the heritage and character of those areas remain a part of South Australia that we all enjoy.

The sell-off of open space as part of the Glenside Hospital redevelopment is causing enormous concern in the seats of Unley and Bragg, with 42 per cent of open space being sold off. The Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse told the other chamber that the sell-off of Glenside was part of the government's plan to control the urban growth boundary—again, more urban consolidation in the inner suburbs. There is very little planning involved in urban consolidation and that is one of the biggest concerns that people have about it, that there are no plans. They buy into a street for its streetscape; they buy into a street for its character; they buy into a street for the historic nature of the street and the nice setbacks that those homes have; the trees that the streets have; the trees that are growing in the gardens; and before they know it, a bluestone home has been demolished and a McMansion of three residences has been built from boundary to boundary next to them. That has a significant impact on the lifestyle of those living there.

That is a major concern for people living in my electorate of Unley, as is Unley Road. Unley Road is another interesting story. At a time when we are seeing enormous government revenues, above the budgeted revenues that the government was expecting, there still seems to be no money for the desperately needed upgrade of Unley Road. A feasibility study went on for a couple of years and a plan was approved under Diana Laidlaw, the former transport minister, for two lanes in and one lane out in the morning and the reverse in the afternoon. There were also more crossing points for pedestrians. The good thing about this plan was that all the stakeholders—those who operated the strip shopping, the council, the residents—felt that the plan would work and it would be very cost effective.

The only thing it needed was for the new transport minister—and I believe it was Trish White at the time, the member for Taylor—to take that to cabinet for cabinet approval. Even though it was recommended for cabinet approval, the minister decided not to do that and there was no funding, so we are still waiting for funding on Unley Road. It affects all the people who live not only in Unley but also south through the electorates of Waite and Davenport as well.


[Sitting suspended from 18:00 to 19:30]


The Hon. K.O. FOLEY (Port Adelaide—Deputy Premier, Treasurer, Minister for Industry and Trade, Minister for Federal/State Relations) (19:31): Unlike the Leader of the Opposition, I am not at all fazed by the fact that the chamber is not full of people listening to me.

Mr Bignell interjecting:

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: I am speaking to close the debate. I am trying to think back to when I was shadow treasurer and how many people from the then government were listening to me. There were not too many and, I have to be honest, there were not too many of my own colleagues, either.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: All my colleagues were behind me. On behalf of the government, I thank members for their contributions. Over the course of this week they have been incredibly informative. Members have taken all volumes of the budget papers and forensically gone through the numbers and been prepared to both praise and criticise, but they have done so in a way that is incredibly non-partisan. It is a unique opportunity for us in this house to listen to a debate that is not based on party politics but, rather, what people actually think of the budget.

I have listened to all the contributions. Notwithstanding criticisms of the government's budget, the majority of voting members of this house believe that this budget is a good budget. I believe that if one is able to bring down a budget and the majority of voting members of parliament think it is a good budget, then, clearly, it is a good budget. The fact that a minority do not think it is a good budget, well, that is the beauty of our democracy. As long as we are in government and we are able to bring down a budget that is accepted by the majority of members of this house, then I think we will remain in government. This is a fairly logical approach to it.

This is budget No. 7 for the government. There is a surplus. I saw some nonsense about its being a deficit budget on a cash basis. Well, that shows how little the opposition knows about framing a modern budget. The modern budget has two principal measures on which to assess the budget. The first is the net operating surplus or balance or deficit; that is, the day-to-day expenses are in surplus and income well exceeds the expenditure.

We are, and always have been, extremely strong on that, but we have made a sensible decision to borrow in order to reinvest in capital in this state. The bizarre suggestion from the Leader of the Opposition that five years ago we should have put $3.7 billion (I think that is the figure he mentioned) into a future fund beggars belief. What he is saying is that we should not have spent the $3.7 billion on recurrent and/or capital on which it has been spent. He identifies none of the savings or none of the areas on which we should not have spent money. He says that somehow we should have put it into a fund to pay for the infrastructure of today.

What I can say is that when we came to government we were focused on the fact that we had to deliver a net lending surplus and a net operating surplus. The only way in which this state could ever regain a AAA credit rating was if it got its accounts into balance. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of the Leader of the Opposition, with the nonsense that was the record of the former treasurer Rob Lucas and the sale of many billions of dollars worth of assets in ETSA the former Liberal government was incapable of getting its operating expenses under control. It was incapable of spending less than it earnt—but we did that.

An overwhelming theme that was coming through constantly from not only my own colleagues but also the business community, the trade union movement, the left of politics—and, if I went through enough Hansard I would probably find from many Liberals—was that we should be prepared to borrow for infrastructure.

An absurd suggestion which has come out of this particular budget from the Leader of the Opposition is that somehow it is wrong for us to be borrowing for infrastructure. The truth is that there is a simple choice. If we do not borrow for infrastructure for the big projects, we do not get them. We cannot find $2 billion out of a $12 billion budget in one year. That is just nonsensical.

I know the member for Ashford would almost fall off her chair for my saying this, but it has taken some time for me to accept that, if we are building infrastructure to service a community for 30 or 40 years, why should the taxpayers of today pay for something that will be used by taxpayers for the next 30, 40 for 50 years. So, you spread that over the life cycle of the project; and, if it so wishes, any government into the future can pay down that debt. It is almost bizarre when the left of politics or the trade union movement and business almost sort of connect at the same point, but a business will always and should always properly gear itself. No business that wants to grow can do so without an appropriate level of gearing, and so should a state government be prepared to do it on its balance sheet. The $5.2 billion figure the Leader of the Opposition sprouts around and says, 'This is of State Bank proportion' is nonsense.

There is roughly $2 billion of budget debt. I do not have the exact numbers in front of me, but $1.2 billion will be the desalination plant which will be recovered through pricing mechanisms. The bulk of that remaining non-budget debt will be stored in the Forestry Corporation and within SA Water itself. SA Water, under a former Liberal government, was set up as a public corporation required to act and behave as if it was in the private sector. For it to do that and for it to be properly pricing its product, it needed to have a level of gearing. The non-budget sector debt is underpinned by the income that, to a large extent, SA Water earns.

The budget debt is projected to rise to $2 billion, and that is underpinned by a budget of some $12 billion; but, more importantly, it is underpinned by operating surpluses in the out years of some $400 million. There is a good, sizeable hunk of income to meet the interest payments on that debt, and that $400 million surplus we have got scheduled in the budget in the out years is net of interest payments on debt. You are not meeting your interest payments from that surplus: it is net of interest payments. The state budget structurally is in a very sound position.

I think that all of us on our side of politics can be very proud—whenever our time comes when we move onto other careers, or whatever—when we look back, because, as a state Labor government, we will have rebuilt our hospital system; will have rebuilt, to a large extent, the major fabric of our school system; and we will have rebuilt, added significant capacity and 21st century conditions in terms of our prison systems. A desalination plant will have been in place and operating, and we will have a state-of-the-art world-class public infrastructure in terms of the light rail and electrification of our system.

I doubt there will ever be a government since Tom Playford's that could ever look back on its time in office—and all of us have been a part of this government in whatever capacity—and say, 'We have made a big difference.' Indeed, If one looks at the social services (and the member for Ashford was an outstanding minister and early champion of the fact) one can see that we had to give greater attention to kids in danger. One thing I find extraordinarily bizarre and quite distressing is that there has never been a time of greater wealth in our society. Regardless of one's politics or philosophical view, there has never been a greater time for personal, community and societal wealth than there is today.

But running with that is this abhorrent, obscene dark side—this insidious legacy that we as a human race are now leaving, and that is that kids are not safe in their homes. They are less safe today than they were decades ago, and that is not just in our state or our country, it is worldwide in the western world. I would hate to look at the underbelly of the Second and Third World countries or other places, perhaps in the Middle East. If a democracy at its wealthiest time in existence can still allow kids to be treated the way they are and need to be taken into state care is an incredible failing of us all who serve in government in western democracies. However, we have put as much into that as we can.

We have put as much as we can into hospitals. I must say that, and I do not want to be particularly provocative, in the last three or four years in this place, I feel like I am in some sort of twilight zone—like, where am I? We have got a Prime Minister, a federal Treasurer and every economic commentator extremely concerned about inflation in this nation, and one of the great drivers of inflation is wages explosions. Members will recall that the Hawke Labor government of the early 1980s put in place a system, and the great efforts of quite extraordinary people like Bill Kelty and Cliff Dolan realised that the trade union movement had a responsibility as much as government and business did to understand that if we have a wages explosion and we let inflation run rampant the people it hurts the most are working people.

In those days they came up with the Accord and other mechanisms. I accept that the world has moved on, but I do think I am in some sort of a twilight zone when I am in here and getting shouted down by various members of the Liberal Party who say, 'We are not paying teachers enough. You are not offering them a wage that keeps up with inflation.' That may or may not be a legitimate point, but for it to come from conservatives I find extraordinary. In terms of the gay abandon the Liberal Party now has—oh, my God, talk about gay abandon! That is arguably the ugliest thing I have ever seen in this place.

The Hon. M.J. Atkinson: It is the Croatian National—

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: No. Just in case posterity ever wants to look at what I was just referring to, the Attorney-General has walked in wearing a pair of running shorts, a soccer top, and gloves.

The Hon. M.J. Atkinson: From Croatia.

Mr VENNING: I have a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I think that what the Attorney-General is wearing could almost be classified as a display, and I ask you to rule accordingly.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, in fact, that is not the point of order. There is one, but if you do not know it, I cannot help you.

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: Madam Deputy Speaker, I have once been in a pair of footy shorts in the chamber. I hope I did not look like that. Anyway, I will wrap up, because I am wandering into a philosophical discussion about where the world is heading.

Whatever our faults as a Labor government, whatever our mistakes and weaknesses, this government is serving the people of this state to the best of our ability. Ultimately, it will be for others to decide whether that is worthy of a third term, but, if I may indulge myself by giving a lesson about politics to the opposition members, let me say that by all means they should be prepared to be critics and by all means they should be prepared to look for maximum mayhem. However, I think they do a disservice to the Liberal Party and the philosophical beliefs of their party when they choose to take populist positions that exploit tensions within the opposing political party. I say that because no-one every seriously believed, or would ever believe, that they would deliver a fairer outcome on the WorkCover scheme than a Labor Party, notwithstanding where we are at.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: Well, members opposite laugh. Are you seriously suggesting that a conservative party of this state would suggest that we are not paying our teachers and doctors enough? At the end of the day, you can choose to walk away from your own inbuilt philosophical beliefs, your own party policies, and what you know you would never do in government in an attempt to get elected. Whatever we did in our opposition days, there was a philosophical underpinning of it. There was a philosophical underpinning of the negativity we had towards the sale of ETSA. There was a philosophical underpinning of much of what we did in opposition. What has struck me about members of this Liberal Party, Madam Deputy Speaker, is that they have been prepared to jettison their own philosophical beliefs to gain popular support. It really is quite silly when a Liberal Party attacks a Labor government because we are not doing right by the trade union movement, in its view, and we are not prepared to offer the wages that it thinks we should.

If all that is left for opposition members is to jettison their philosophical, moral and party policy positions to be popular, by God, what fabric holds them together? What makes them an alternative government? The great weakness of politics in this state in recent years has been the inability of the Liberal Party to behave as a coherent, organised, disciplined machine.

Mr Venning interjecting:

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: And the member for Schubert knows exactly what I am talking about, because I have got history in this place. At a time when this state needed decisive leadership, brave leadership, courageous leadership, a leadership based on making sure our state could regain itself—

Mr Williams interjecting:

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: Well, Mitch, you weren't around when I was around. What I saw was the rank division, the undermining, the white-anting and the ability to decide that a party in government would be prepared to sacrifice the state's future because it was more determined to deal with internal politics than the good of the state. I say that from a historical perspective because, as I look opposite now, I do not necessarily see quite the same division, but what I see is a political party prepared to mortgage its philosophical and moral reasons for existence to appeal to the voters to get into parliament.

From the level of cockiness that we now see opposite, there is no question that the Leader of the Opposition sees himself as the next Premier. I do not blame him for that. In all fairness to him, you would not want to do that job if you did not see yourself as the alternative premier of this state. The member for MacKillop, and others on the front bench, see themselves as future ministers. They may well be, and they may well be there at the next election. But the thing that is very clear in our state's politics, as I have learned through my long association in state politics, is that you actually have to get there and earn it before you can start behaving like you are the government of the day.

I can say to members opposite: you will have a mighty fight at the next state election, because, since the day we were elected to government in 2002 right through to today, we have remained a determined government—not a government without fault, not a government without weaknesses, and not a government that could have done better, but a united Labor Party, a united cabinet and a government which, through the successful leadership of the Premier, has ensured that we, for all of our faults as a government, deliver cohesive, controlled and disciplined government.

I am someone who has been a staff member in the Bannon-Arnold government and a member in opposition in this state for eight years. Both the Bannon-Arnold Labor government (as history no doubt says much better than I can here tonight) and, without a shadow of a doubt, the Brown-Olsen government years were pretty bad when it came to governance. And, as Labor politicians, we have had to wear it.

Mr Venning: Arnold wasn't that bad. He was straight.

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: No, but I can tell you that, when we needed a political party to have its act together to take the state from the dark days of the State Bank collapse and restore our confidence and lead us into a great future, it was the Liberal Party in 1993, and it failed. It failed because John Olsen wanted the job that Dean Brown had and Dean Brown wanted the job that John Olsen ultimately took from him. Those lost eight years meant that, when we came into office, there had been a period of stagnation and division and painful, sloppy, undisciplined government. It required a disciplined unit to come in and run this state, and we have done that.

The penny will drop one day with the member for Morphett, who is the greatest exponent of this. Whatever comes into his mind he announces. He announced the other day that we should electrify our country rail system. I am not sure whether it was $6 billion or $8 billion, but the idea of electrified rail corridors to Kimba and Cleve and all those places defies belief. The member for MacKillop, who puts himself out as some sort of economic genius—

Mr Williams interjecting:

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: He may well be, and I may not be very good at my job and this whole front bench may not be very good at their job; however, what I do know is that Labor in this state has delivered strong, effective and disciplined government, which has our budget strongly in surplus. We are rebuilding and reinvesting in the state. We are delivering more doctors, nurses, and police than any government before us. We are not a government without fault and we are not a government without mistakes, but we are a government that has done this state proud in the last seven years, because we were the first government that I can think of in the last 20 years that has had its act together in terms of its ability to govern this state.

Ultimately, people will make a decision in 18 months' time about whether we deserve to be re-elected. But I say to members opposite that they do their party, their philosophical base and the people of this state no service by jettisoning everything they believe in for cheap populism. They should have the courage of their convictions and the courage to stand by what their party believes in, and ultimately people may well be prepared to elect them if they show the leadership that is required.

An honourable member interjecting:

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: They say, 'Look at the adelaidenow website.' Strike action occurs and protests occur. Governments that reform and achieve things do so with a degree of political risk. They do so with the real likelihood that there will be a strong community reaction. We had to reform WorkCover: we had no choice. It divided our party internally but we held together and we stayed together, notwithstanding the internal divisions that may or may not have occurred. The sight of trade unionists protesting on the steps of this parliament does not give the Labor government any pleasure at all; however, we will not be pushed into a wages outcome based on a turnout at a strike or emotive action.

If the member for Morphett thinks that the Labor government has had a bad few days because we are getting protests and the adelaidenow website may not look good, he may well be right. But the difference is that we are fit for government and they are not. If you want to govern a state where you do not have people protesting or reacting negatively towards you, you are not a government. If you govern just to keep people happy you are a weak, insipid, irrelevancy as a government. If that is what members opposite offer this state—if they offer this state no courage, vision or ability to take a risk in how they govern—they are no government; they are a pale shade of what was once the proud Liberal Party of this state. I think their forefathers will be looking back now and thinking, 'Is this really the party that we built?'

Mr Venning interjecting:

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: You will get a lecture, the member for Schubert. As long as a member who is 70 years of age (with all due respect to the member for Schubert) still wants to hold onto his seat, as long as Rob Lucas in another place, who could walk out tomorrow earning more than he earns as a member, selfishly holds onto his seat to stop new people coming in, if we see the Christian Democrats (or whatever they call themselves in this place) bringing Robert Brokenshire back, and Joe Scalzi—they cannot even give the state new people or new blood—

An honourable member interjecting:

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: Trish Draper wants to re-enter politics. They are just a moribund bunch of politicians who are into recycling themselves, not about rejuvenating this state. Ivan, do your party a service and retire. Why are you standing at the next election at 68 years of age? Why is Rob Lucas doing so? Probably because he could not get a job anywhere else is why he remains in this place. Anyway, it is not for me to comment.

Mr Williams interjecting:

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: Oh, female members, they said. Are you preselecting a female at the next election? There will barely be a female in the Liberal Party at the next election. Anyway, that is for their party to decide. I am proud to be a Labor member of parliament, I am proud to be part of a Labor government, I am proud to be a Labor treasurer, and I am proud of our budget. As I said, I am more than happy to sign any copy of Hansard that members opposite would like to raffle in their local Liberal Party sub-branch.

Mr Williams: Your last speech—

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: No. I look forward to being Treasurer for another six budgets. But no more after that. You can get six more out of me and that is it.

An honourable member interjecting:

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: Five budgets, is it? I have never been good at maths. You do not look that enthusiastic, colleagues, about my hanging around.

Bill read a second time.

Estimates Committees

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: I move:

That this bill be referred to estimates committees.

Motion carried.

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: I move:

That a message be sent to the Legislative Council requesting the Minister for Police (Hon. Paul Holloway), the Minister for Emergency Services (Hon. Carmel Zollo) and the Minister for Environment and Conservation (Hon. Gail Gago), members of the Legislative Council, be permitted to attend and give evidence before the estimates committees of the House of Assembly on the Appropriation Bill.

Motion carried.

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY (Port Adelaide—Deputy Premier, Treasurer, Minister for Industry and Trade, Minister for Federal/State Relations) (20:00): I move:

That the house note grievances.

Dr McFETRIDGE (Morphett) (20:01): I want to use the few minutes available to me to speak about something that needs to be done in my electorate of Morphett and also about a few other issues. While a lot of money was splashed around or proposed to be spent in this budget, there is very little that was spent in the electorate of Morphett. But before I talk about that, I want to talk about one of my shadow portfolios—industrial relations. I have had a little bit to say about the issues involved in industrial relations at the moment but I have been leaving it up to the quite capable shadow ministers for health and education.

However, yesterday I was made aware of another dispute that is going on—and I am pleased that the member for Colton is in the house because it will be of interest to him—with the firefighters. The EB is up for renewal and I have been reliably told that the government or its representatives are refusing to attend those meetings. I hope that is not the case and I hope the member for Colton is ensuring that is not the case. But I have a couple of things to say to the Minister for Industrial Relations, the Hon. Michael Wright. First of all, to your own self be true.

I am not a good negotiator, so a number of years ago I did a commercial negotiation course. I think it did me a little bit of good and I certainly remembered a lot of the things I should be getting other people to do when in negotiations. I have a little card from ScotWorks, the crowd I saw and spoke to, and they are very knowledgeable people. They have a list here of the eight steps in negotiating skills and I will put them on Hansard for the Minister for Industrial Relations to think about.

You have to prepare. You have to know what you want, where you want to go and what you want to do and what you are prepared to settle for; then you have to argue your case in a cogent and logical fashion. You have to be able to signal to the people you are negotiating with about what may be acceptable and what is completely unacceptable, and you have to be able to let them know that you are not just shutting things off. You have to put up proposals—of course, you have to be in the same room and you have to talk to the people concerned to be able to do that—and then you have to be able to package it all together in a package that is acceptable to everybody. You close off by making sure that all the bargaining issues are sorted out, then you close your deal, you agree and you can all go home. They are the eight steps of negotiating.

Some of the other things that they have listed here are that you have to be realistic and you should be rewarding the signs that are coming from the other side. Certainly, the fact that the doctors and teachers, and hopefully the firefighters, are willing to speak and negotiate and talk at any time is something that should be rewarded. You need to be making sure that all of your approaches are realistic so that nobody is being led up the garden path, and you yourself have to be realistic about the outcomes you are expecting.

I commend a negotiating course to the Minister for Industrial Relations because I think that, by the way things are going, it is not good, and I certainly hope the firefighters, along with the teachers and doctors, are able to speak to the Labor government. We were being lectured on the attitude of the Liberal government by the Treasurer just a moment ago. I think the current situation in South Australia—whether it is to do with WorkCover or industrial relations—speaks for itself. This Labor government is not new Labor nor is it progressive Labor but it is still supposed to be Labor, and I think they have forgotten their roots.

The estimates committees we are about to go into are going to be an interesting experience. I am really looking forward to the area of transport because there are so many issues that I need to have sorted out in my own mind. I am a tram fan—I love my trams—but I do not see any real plan here. This proposition, because it is not a plan, has been cobbled together in the past few weeks. I hope I am wrong but I can see no evidence whatsoever that this is any more than a mishmash of wish lists and feelgood statements that are stuck so far out the distance that people will have forgotten what they were talking about or they will not be there to do it anyway. Let's find out in the estimates committees.

In my electorate of Morphett, one of the issues that keeps coming up is the King Street Bridge over the Pat. This morning at a stakeholders meeting, we talked about the need to close the licensed venues there at two or three o'clock in the morning because of some alleged social issues. I was sitting next to the former Labor candidate for Morphett, Tim Looker. Tim is now Councillor Looker on the local council and I said to him, 'What about the King Street Bridge?' He said that it is a state government issue, that it is state infrastructure and that it should be funded by the state. Even your own candidate down there thinks that should happen. Seventy per cent of the people who use that bridge are not from the City of Holdfast Bay. Why should the cost of this be shifted onto the City of Holdfast Bay? I just hope at some stage there is a rethink about that bridge. I hope it is not going to take a collapse or a terrible accident to make the government do something about it.

This morning I had leave from parliament for a little while to attend a meeting in Holdfast Bay with the council, the police, the Office of the Liquor and Gambling Commissioner and DRUG ARM, who do a fantastic job. We were talking about whether there is a need to curb the opening hours in the Bay and whether there is a problem with binge drinking. Chief Inspector Graeme Adcock was there who gave us some real insight into what is going on. The statistics have actually been going down through good policing in the past couple of years. He had some very interesting video footage of Moseley Square very early in the morning between one and three o'clock in the morning.

Very little was going on. The perception of antisocial behaviour is there and the noise is there and, certainly, we need to cope with some issues. A lot of younger people come down there and the Bay has been a fantastic place for years and years, so people want to come there. The younger people go there and they are getting a bit out of control, but it is not over the top. It is not a bad place to be, and the police are doing a fantastic job.

What I would like to see, though, to give the police some assistance is not just CCTV in Moseley Square but also on Jetty Road and perhaps the main side streets so that, when people are leaving venues or people cannot get into venues because they are under age (and quite rightly are not allowed to get into those venues), when they are a bit disgruntled, if there is some antisocial behaviour, they will be deterred from acting in that way because they will be on CCTV.

That does not necessarily need to be live-monitored. I would prefer that, but I would really like to have it recorded at least so that, if there is an incident, police can follow it up. Chief Superintendent Graeme Adcock and Chief Inspector Les Buckley are doing a fantastic job down there, and I would like to commend all the police in the Sturt LSA for the job they do. They are doing a great job.

Let us look at state funding for things down there, not just King Street Bridge but also New Year's Eve. New Year's Eve activities cost the ratepayers of Holdfast Bay about $125,000 a year. If the police, the council and the government, I think, were honest, they would admit to themselves that if they do not organise something down there, people will still go there and then there will be issues, so we need to have an organised event down there. To expect the ratepayers of Holdfast Bay to pay for that, I think, is very unfair.

With the extension of the tramline, more people are coming down to Glenelg. Last New Year's Eve, 35,000 people came down to the Bay on the tram and on buses. Great, fantastic, they are welcome down there, and they were all well-behaved because we had 85 police down there. It was a fantastic effort by the police and they do a terrific job for a great night, but why should the City of Holdfast Bay, the ratepayers—including me, so I will declare that—have to pay for what is really a state celebration and a terrific celebration? I ask the government to reconsider its attitude to funding that. The council could then put some money into other issues.

There are three issues in particular that the council should put money into. I think it is an indictment of the mentality of some council members that there are three issues that need to be funded out of ratepayers funds. One is putting money towards the upgrade of the toilets at the Glenelg Oval, which would be used by the kids in the Glenelg Primary School. The state government and the footy club are putting money in but the local government is not. It is a disgrace. So the kids have to use almost condemnable toilets at Glenelg Primary School.

The other issue is stormwater management. Sure, there is a plan with local government and the state government, but a lot of work remains to be done because we get a lot of stuff coming down through Sturt Creek and Brownhill Creek through to the Pat. So there are more issues down there than local government can cope with and the state government needs to put its hand in its pocket. I do not think that the local government is doing enough by way of consultation with residents about stormwater management.

The last issue is the lights at Glenelg Football Oval. The ratepayers do not have to put in any money for this. Telstra was going to put the money in for it, but the council is blocking lights at the football oval. Why would you not have lights at Glenelg Football Oval for footy and for Twenty20 cricket?

Time expired.

The Hon. S.W. KEY (Ashford) (20:11): I must say it is very difficult trying to speak to the state budget, particularly after the brilliant speech that the Treasurer made defending, and also talking about the philosophy behind, the state budget. There are a couple of areas that I would like to speak about with regard to the state budget that I am particularly excited about.

One of them is the new project to tune up South Australian buildings. As someone who has a fascination with building as well as architecture and development in this state and also on an international level, I think that the $2 million Building Tune Ups Project to make commercial buildings in the Adelaide CBD more energy efficient is a wonderful initiative on the part of the government. The Premier has already announced the four-year project supporting the third sector agreement entered into under the Climate Change and Greenhouse Emissions Reduction Act 2007 between the state government and the Property Council of Australia, also working with the Local Government Association. I believe this all happened at the Local Government Association's Climate Change Summit.

Who would have thought, just looking back five years ago, that we would be talking about climate change, not to mention that we would have a minister for sustainability and climate change. While I am a long-term greenie—I think I have quite good credentials in this area—I am particularly proud that the Labor government, particularly the Premier, has taken on the responsibility for sustainability and climate change. I think this sends a very important message out there about how important it is.

The other reason I support the Building Tune Ups Project is that it seems that this is an opportunity for us to reduce emissions from existing commercial buildings and their contribution to climate change. It is thought that, by following through with this project until 2012, there is the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 70,000 tonnes per year. It is a bit like weight loss; we all need to lose weight—I certainly do—and every kilo is important, so certainly in reducing greenhouse gas emissions every tonne counts, and if we can reduce something like 70,000 tonnes a year that is a good start. So I really do support the fact that we are trying to make a start in this area.

The other thing about this project is that, by supporting it, South Australia will continue to be home to the highest number of green buildings in the nation by upgrading existing buildings, rather than just solely focusing on new developments. As people in this chamber probably know, almost one quarter of Australia's carbon emissions can be attributed to the energy consumed in buildings. There is a lot of support for the project, and I am hoping that eventually our electorate offices will be on that agenda and that, like the fantastic program that has been happening and rolled out in our schools, we too as members of parliament can contribute to climate change by making those differences.

The other initiative that I was particularly pleased to hear about in the electorate of Ashford is the Adelaide Showgrounds upgrade. I am a member of the Royal Adelaide Show. It is probably the only thing other than the Royal JP's Association that I am a member of that has 'royal' in it, because I am a very proud republican. Putting that to one side, I think having the largest solar rooftop installation is something to be proud of.

I did listen to what the member for Flinders said with regard to this project, but I disagree with her. This is a great initiative. I understand that her responsibility is to defend her patch, and I respect that, but, as I said, not only as a member of the show but also as the member for Ashford, I am really proud that 1,000 kilowatts of solar panels will be installed on the roof of the soon-to-be opened—I am sure the member for Goyder will appreciate this—Goyder Pavilion at the centrepiece of the Adelaide Showgrounds upgrade.

For me, the fact that the government, through our Minister for Sustainability and Climate Change, has committed $8 million to this project, which will have the largest rooftop photovoltaic installation in Australia, which I am told is five times the size of the next largest installation, the Melbourne Victoria Markets, is something to be very proud of.

I also think that it provides a showcase for other organisations to look at what is happening at the show. The show is a very respected organisation as well as an event that a lot of us really enjoy attending. This is on top of, as I said before, a number of other solar panels on major buildings, such as the South Australian Museum, the State Library, the Art Gallery, Parliament House, Adelaide Airport, and 250 public schools across the state as part of our Solar Schools Program. As the member for Ashford, I am very pleased that this is located in my electorate.

Mrs PENFOLD (Flinders) (20:17): My constituents and I are feeling devastated by Labor's new Country Health Care Plan which downgrades 43 hospitals across regional South Australia, with eight on Eyre Peninsula. The country health plan states:

The population of Eyre Peninsula...and the West Coast will be served by the Port Lincoln Country General Hospital and by the Whyalla Country General Hospital.

Cummins, Elliston, Streaky Bay, Tumby Bay [and] Wudinna GP Plus emergency hospitals—

I add Cleve, Kimba and Cowell.

—will provide emergency response and other services in line with community needs, which may include expanded primary health care services, aged care support, observation beds and respite/palliative care beds. The GP Plus emergency hospitals will over time develop closer links with the Port Lincoln General Hospital, Whyalla General Hospital and the Ceduna Community Hospital for inpatient care and specialised community and allied health services.

Birthing and surgical services currently provided in Cummins will be transferred to the Port Lincoln General Hospital over time. The current close relationship between Streaky Bay and Ceduna will continue for the provision of birthing services for Streaky Bay.

Surgical services currently provided at Streaky Bay will over time move to Ceduna to meet expected workforce shortages.

My feelings of disbelief followed by anger and those of the people of Eyre Peninsula are summed up in the many visits, phone calls, letters, emails and faxes to my office far more adequately than I can say with yet another speech about the concerns I feel for regional South Australia's people under this Labor government. In a letter to the Minister for Health from my constituents, Julie and Scott Crettenden, they state that it is the first time they have ever written to a politician but they are so distressed and angered at the news that the local hospital at Cummins is to have its services downgraded that they feel compelled to voice their concerns. They state:

You may not understand the strength of feeling about this issue, but in rural Australia the hospital is the heart of an area. My first job was as a cleaner at the Cummins Hospital. Both of our children were born there. My husband, a farmer, has had numerous occasions to visit and stay at the hospital; as have I for surgical procedures, or with an asthmatic toddler, or when our children were involved in a school bus crash. And last year my nanna passed away there.

Our hospital is staffed with people we know well, and who are key members of our community—any cuts to services will see many of them lose their jobs, and possibly they will leave the town. Our whole community is involved in fund-raising for our hospital because it's 'our' hospital.

Another constituent, Mrs Charlton, wrote the following:

If services are cut here we will probably lose Dr Quigley who is a fantastic doctor and his two part-time doctors Claire Rowe and Lexie Yuill. If this happens then we'll lose our chemist and probably our services of physios, podiatrists and dietician, then we won't be able to attract teachers with young families or expecting to have babies because of no proper medical or hospital services. Our town will die—there's nothing surer.

The tone of people living in isolated rural areas is one of extreme worry, and many have expressed their deep concern that lives will be lost. I quote again:

This has the potential to issue a death warrant for many members of our community.

There is a concern about the availability of doctors who know their patients and community well. Again, I quote:

Farmers are going through tough times with the drought, cost of fuel and follow-on costs of fertiliser, transport, etc., and also more cases of mental depression than ever before. It is literally like a kick in the teeth when a plan comes out to take away even more services, such as the one you are proposing. It takes a lot of courage to operate a farm, and even more courage for a local farmer to go to the doctor to see about his depression.

The tone of the people who contact me certainly continues to echo that they are concerned about losing their well-loved, appreciated and admired doctors. I quote:

If these closures are implemented you will have lives lost. And not forgetting the large losses of doctors and staff, because they will not hang around to look after 'old folks homes' and/or staging centres for the transfer of patients to your large central hospitals—they will, I know, just simply retire. Words fail me...

Constituents Brian and Wendy Treloar question the mentality of these decisions. They ask what consideration has been given to the flow-on effect that taking away health services will have. They state:

Consider the role of a country GP, the role of relief doctors, visiting health specialists, visiting medical staff. What about the school without a doctor and a hospital? The policeman who won't come because he and his family have no medical service, chemists forced to close. Because according to you, Mr Hill, and your henchmen we can go to Port Lincoln for our treatment and our scripts. That is 66 km from Cummins and what about those who live out from the township—would you, Mr Hill, travel so far to get a prescription?

And how about the price of petrol today? My husband has had two heart attacks—he would not have survived the road trip to Port Lincoln. He had a blood clot on his lungs following surgery. He would not have survived the road trip to Port Lincoln. The local doctor on call saved his life.

There are numerous stories of people who would have died had full professional help not been available at our country hospitals. I call on the member for Chaffey and minister in this Labor government to stand up with her National Party President, Wilbur Klein, and publicly renounce the decision made by the Rann Labor government. As he said in an open letter to the Minister for Health:

If this policy proceeds, it will impact negatively on the ability of these communities to attract and retain quality health professionals, allied health workers, other professional services as well as new industry. The health and wellbeing of many country people will be put at risk and the very sustainability of these communities will also be put at risk.

I quote from another letter received today:

I wonder if you have any idea of the travel time involved for people within the area. There are no buses to catch you know, so we are unlikely to get there for $2 to $3, the cost of a city fare. Nor is there a ten minute wait for an ambulance that speeds out from a centre with a specialist crew on board. Our ambulance is manned by volunteers who get a call, travel from their homes to the town, then travel out to any required area. They respond as quickly and as well as they possibly can, but we need to know there is the best attention medically available at the hospital plus treatment. What a strain will you be placing upon these people, or do you intend to supply the paid ambulance staff? Your plan: off to the regional centre we go, cut off from family and friends. Have you checked the price of fuel for travel?

What about nursing staff? Most are locally sourced and there goes their employment. Their skills to manage significant illnesses are lost to the community, and what a loss to the rural community in general as they are lost to the health system. A care centre you indicate, but when I need care there will be so many patients from outside of our area sent to our hospital that the care I may need will be unavailable to me.

Your government seems to be biased against the rural communities. They are most productive, self-reliant people who are battling many adversities at the present time, drought, etc. You appear to favour those who do not help themselves. Our hospital needs to be available in its present capacity, or to be upgraded to encourage rural communities to again feel a part of this state you say is so great. We pay enough tax from this area to warrant that.

Finally, Wendy Treloar sums up the sentiments of country people throughout South Australia:

You are playing with people's lives, Mr Hill. People will die, Mr Hill, no question, people will die.

Ms SIMMONS (Morialta) (20:26): I rise today in support of the Appropriation Bill. The key action of this budget for transport development has been long in the planning, but we will see developments in the infrastructure of this state that will provide a framework for the future development of our city long overdue. It will attract more and more South Australians to use the public transport system over the next decade and that has to be good for this state. The more cars we can get off the road the better for us all.

An extra 80 buses providing up to nine million extra passenger journeys over four years is in response to calls from the public for a more efficient bus system. The new proposed ticketing system will also cut processing time and speed journeys for all passengers. However, the investment of $2 billion to electrify northern and southern rail lines, the purchase of 50 new electric trains and the extension of the tramline, together with the provision of extra trams to boost the fleet will, in my opinion, revitalise our city and take it to a new visionary level.

It shows that this government is able to think and plan beyond the term of each government, that it has the good of the state, the future of the state at its heart. We are taking action now for the future of the state. These are not short-term, populous plans, but long-term visionary plans that will develop this state, so that we can continue to punch well above our weight in comparison to the eastern states and attract and maintain our workforce. This budget also makes provision for $700 million to be spent on the state's roads during the next four years. These projects will include road widening and shoulder sealing, including $40,000 for Gorge Road, in my own electorate of Morialta.

I have a very special interest in our health system and I am delighted that this budget builds on last year's budget with another record amount of money for health in 2008-09 of $3.246 billion. In particular, there will be an extra $26.6 million to the SA Ambulance Service over the next four years. We as a government really value the work of our paramedics and recognise that the growing demand for their services means that we need to employ more paramedics to cope with this increase. In conjunction with this money will be an additional $7.3 million to replace and upgrade ambulance stations across the state.

I am also pleased that we are providing $2.6 million to replace two country mobile vans for BreastScreen SA, a topic that I have talked about in this place at length on a previous occasion. These will be installed with state of the art digital mammography technology. This is a very important initiative to women living in country SA if we are to be able to keep up our proactive testing program and encourage women over 50, plus others at risk, to undertake routine mammograms. While we continue with our $1.7 billion plan for the new Marjorie Jackson-Nelson Hospital, we have committed $7.2 million to refurbish parts of the RAH to increase capacity, while the new hospital is under construction.

Having spent much of my adult life working in the disability and ageing sectors, I am proud of this government's commitment to increase disability funding in order to improve the quality of life of people with disabilities. In this budget there is an additional $5 million to clear the waiting lists for equipment for children and adults. This will provide more than 1,230 pieces of equipment, such as wheelchairs, walking frames and hoists, which enable people to remain independent in their own home.

One piece of equipment for which Novita has lobbied for some time is the redevelopment of the hydrotherapy pool at the Regency Park centre, and I am pleased that a further $2 million will be provided to redevelop that pool, which is used by almost by 200 special students from 16 different schools across the city.

Despite the message delivered by the opposition, spending on disability services has increased considerably under this government, from $118 million in 2001-02 to $201.2 million. On top of this increased recurrent funding, we have provided extra one-off spending totalling $51.6 million. On top of this, there is extra investment to help people with disabilities in transport, recreation and sport. Since 2002 the Rann government has also invested an extra $75.7 million in education to increase support for students with extra needs, including students with a disability.

As my electorate covers both the Adelaide Plains and Hills areas, I am pleased that the CFS firefighting effort has been further supported, particularly in the area of aerial firefighting. An Erickson air-crane will now be based primarily in South Australia over the fire danger season. This high volume helicopter will complement the existing fleet and support the CFS volunteers tackling fires on the ground. I am also thrilled that the first sod has now been turned on the new Paradise Metropolitan Fire Station in Morialta, which will be completed during this budget cycle.

The Education Works program continues to help many schools through the process of restructuring in order to deliver more efficient and effective school buildings and education outcomes. Campbelltown will see the development of a new one-stop shop children's centre, which will be based in the education hub and which will include Il Nido Child Care Centre, Campbelltown Junior Primary School and Charles Campbell Secondary School. This new centre will help families cope much better by providing a service for children of all ages from birth onwards.

Many families in South Australia now have both parents in the workforce and they often find it extremely difficult and time consuming delivering and picking up children across the age groups from different venues. This government has made early childhood programs a real focus of our education policy and families really appreciate this change in emphasis.

I believe that South Australians deserve to live in a safe and secure environment. This government continues its record funding for police, with an 11 per cent increase in operational funding to nearly $630 million this year—62 per cent more than in 2002-03. I am very pleased that the new police shopfront is now open in Newton. This increase in budget will enable an additional 100 police officers to be employed this year. This is over and above the annual attrition rate.

Youth offending has been a focus for this government, with the Commissioner for Social Inclusion, Monsignor David Cappo, producing a report, 'To Break the Cycle'. This budget sees $11.5 million being devoted to a package of coordinated programs focusing on young offenders and children at risk who have fallen through the gaps of the youth justice system. This money will go a long way towards helping to deter a small group of young repeat offenders from antisocial and criminal behaviour; and I applaud this initiative.

I have highlighted issues that are of particular interest and importance to me, and time does not allow me to go into the whole budget. I believe we are building a better future at all levels of the community. The increase of the payroll tax threshold to $600,000 by mid-2009, together with a cut in payroll tax of 5.25 per cent, will assist small to medium businesses to stay competitive with other states. Some 6,500 businesses employing 380,000 South Australians will benefit. The $4,000 bonus grant for first home buyers will be of great assistance, particularly to young South Australians who are trying to get onto the property ladder and purchase their own home. The government estimates that over 9,000 first home buyers will receive the full grant in 2008-09—that is 9,000 young people who will be assisted to take this very important step to independence. As a mother of two children in their 20s, I know firsthand the struggle in today's world of spiralling costs to make this first step.

This is the third budget since I have been in this place. I am proud to be part of a government that is continually building on long-term visionary plans for this state, with priorities for health, education, law and order, and infrastructure, without forgetting our increasing number of children in care and those with a disability. I commend this bill to the house.

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (20:35): There are a significant number of issues I want to canvass tonight. First, I will talk about things specific to my electorate. My country electorate is quite distant from metropolitan Adelaide and it is one of those parts of the state which is totally ignored in this budget.

I do not know how many times the issue of the pulp mill at Penola has been raised in this house. In fact, in the past 12 months we passed a bill to facilitate a pulp mill being built in my electorate near Penola. I do not think any member in this house could say they were not aware of the extensive blue gum forests that have been planted in my electorate. Some 30,000 to 40,000 hectares of blue gums have been planted over the past 10 to 12 years. All those blue gums are reaching maturity and they will be harvested.

The land will be replanted, but the trees will be harvested and chipped and the chips put into trucks to be transported. They may be transported as far as the pulp mill at Penola, but in the first instance they will be transported right across my electorate and through the adjacent electorate of Mount Gambier to Portland for export. Well over one million tonnes, probably 1.5 million or two million tonnes, a year will be transported. Not one cent in this budget is directed towards building the infrastructure which will be necessary to move those chips—not one cent.

We have been debating about what we should do for at least five or six years now. Everyone knows that the task is in front of us; everyone knows that we have to get on with it and upgrade the road infrastructure to facilitate that industry—not one cent. Every member here knows about the Penola bypass because it has been talked about for so long. In fact, last year the Minister for Transport tried to tell the people in the South-East that he had provisioned for the state's share of the funding to build a bypass around Penola. We are not talking a couple of hundred thousand dollars here, we are talking millions of dollars. There was not one provision in last year's budget and, of course, it is not even on the government's radar now.

Those chips to which I referred a few minutes ago will have to go through the township of Penola. Already something like 600 heavy vehicle movements a day travel through the middle of Penola, down the main street. It is a dangerous place for the locals to go shopping. It will be an even more dangerous place in Penola shortly because its hospital is one of those which will be a GP Plus—a bandaid clinic. The Penola hospital does not provide a huge range of services now, but, when it becomes a GP Plus clinic under minister Hill's plan, it will mean that if you are admitted to the Penola hospital you can stay there for only 24 hours. Once your 24 hours are up, and if you need to be hospitalised for longer, you will be moved. And where will you be moved to?

You might go to Mount Gambier, which is going to be one of these super-duper hospitals. So will that be clogged up with people from surrounding communities who can no longer stay in their own community hospital, or will you have to go to Naracoorte or Millicent, even further away? That is bad enough for the people of Penola, but they will have choices: Naracoorte to the north; Millicent to the south-west; and Mount Gambier to the south-east. What happens to the people in similar circumstances in a place like Meningie? I suggest that members of the government consult minister Hill's map, because he obviously does not know the geography of South Australia. He does not know where these hospitals are that he is intent on closing down.

He does not know where the hospitals are that he will downgrade. He does not understand the implications on families. When you live in a community like Meningie and you need to be hospitalised for more than 24 hours you will be shipped out of your community. He does not understand that you either end up at Millicent two hours south or Murray Bridge an hour to the north. What about all the people in a community like Meningie who are currently hospitalised for more than 24 hours? All their families who are trying to support them through their illness, or whatever it might be, will have to visit them in Murray Bridge.

The irony of this is that, over recent years, the government has funded a public transport service out of Meningie. It has subsidised a local bus company to run a bus which runs from Meningie to Murray Bridge and some other surrounding townships. At the end of this month that funding dries up. At the end of this month those people in Meningie in my electorate have no way of getting to Murray Bridge. Take, for example, a retired couple, because there are a lot of retired people in Meningie. I wish that some of the members of the government would get out of the city and visit some of these communities—go to the Mid North or down into my electorate. Go and visit Meningie and just see how many farming families, particularly out of the Mallee, have taken their retirement and settled in Meningie to enjoy their retirement, because it is a lovely town on the edge of Lake Albert.

Meningie had good services and, particularly, a terrific little country hospital. You could not have open heart surgery there; I doubt whether you would have a hip replacement there, but it is a great little country hospital, and it does cater for the local community. A fantastic couple of very dedicated doctors work in that community, and now members of that community will be shipped out an hour up the road to Murray Bridge, at the very best. Of course, Murray Bridge will be catering for people from all over that region—out of the Mallee in the member for Hammond's electorate. Pinnaroo, Karoonda, and Lameroo will all have GP Plus clinics, and the only place for all the people from those areas to go will be Murray Bridge. The Murray Bridge hospital will be chock-a-block full. Where will the overflow go?

I can only assume that the nearest place for them to come to is here in Adelaide. Is it the health minister's plan to ship people who need two or three days hospitalisation into the Royal Adelaide? What on earth is this plan about? These are the sorts of questions the minister refuses to answer. The minister himself is so embarrassed with this plan that he slipped it out under the darkness of the budget late on Thursday afternoon when the budget had just been brought down. He stood in the house today during question time and spent 10 minutes reading out the names of people and groups that he claims he has consulted with, yet, as soon as we asked him a question, he said, 'But now we are consulting.'

Has he consulted before the plan? Will he consult after the plan? Does he have any damn idea what this plan is about? I suggest that he has not. I suggest that he has no idea; and, as I said earlier in my 20-minute contribution, either he is being snowed by his bureaucrats or, if he knows what they are talking about, he is snowing the community of South Australia. The Deputy Premier half an hour ago told the house, 'This government is serving the people of South Australia to the best of our ability.' If that is accurate, God help South Australia, God help country South Australia and God help metropolitan South Australia. The people I have had the pleasure to represent for 10 years will be devastated by this Country Health Care Plan.

The people of every rural electorate will be devastated, because suddenly not only will you be taking services out of local communities but you will be tearing the fabric of those communities apart. It is not just about health. How on earth do we have businesses survive in a place like Meningie when we are trying to attract a young person to Meningie as a diesel mechanic to service the tractors the farmers are using?

If we are trying to attract an accountant to the town to service the business houses, if we are trying to attract any professional, semi-professional or tradesperson to support the local industry, their wife is likely to say, 'I am going to have a family, I am not going to live in a place where there is no doctor, no hospital and no health service.' That is fact. That is the daily life of country people. You are not just ripping the guts out of country health: you are also ripping the guts out of the country. I think every member of this government needs to sit down and think seriously about this. They need to go and knock on minister Hill's door and say, 'I think you have this wrong, minister. You have to stop talking the rhetoric about consultation and go back to the drawing board.'

The SPEAKER: The member's time has expired.

Mr WILLIAMS: That is most unfortunate, sir.

The SPEAKER: The member for Mawson.

Mr BIGNELL (Mawson) (20:45): I rise in support of this bill. This, the seventh Rann government surplus budget, builds on those great budgets that went before it. It is a budget that obviously has a high degree of spending in the transport area, and builds on previous budgets that have been all about rebuilding this state's health services and education services—building new schools, putting in more teachers and making class sizes smaller.

Year after year we have seen a different focus from the Rann government. First, it was law and order, after the bad days of conservative Liberal government when it turned a blind eye to law and order and allowed crime to get out of control. We put more police on the beat, we have more people in our courts and we have more people in our prisons, because we are not going to take the nonsense that we put up with when the conservatives over there were in power.

I think this is a great budget, but it is not necessarily for me to judge. I think history will be a better judge than me, and, when historians look back on this period from 2002 until now, and into the future, the Rann government will be judged very well against the Kerin months, the Olsen years, the Brown years, the Arnold months, the Bannon years, the Tonkin years, the Corcoran years, and even the Dunstan years. I think you would probably have to go back to Sir Thomas Playford's day to see a government that has brought about such widespread reform in so many areas.

After coming in after the conservatives sold off ETSA and privatised hospitals and the TAB and left a train wreck of an economy here in this state and continually talked down our state, we had to rebuild it and gain the confidence of the people of South Australia, because we had Liberal premier after Liberal premier going out and saying, 'Kick a Vic,' 'South Australia has lost the Grand Prix,' we have done this and done that. They kept talking down South Australia so much that we lost many of our young people interstate. We lost an entire generation.

Since that first day in 2002 the Rann government has been about rebuilding this state and getting South Australians to believe in ourselves as a great state. Now that we have done that, we have business believing in South Australia—not just the local business community but also business people from interstate and overseas who are looking to South Australia as one of the most attractive places in the world to invest. They can see that this government means business and is putting in the social infrastructure and also the infrastructure needed to do business here in South Australia. We see that as a priority, and that is being backed up by the business community.

As well as doing the physical builds, we are also doing a lot to build communities and strengthen our social network, which is all very important. It is no good just the big end of town making billions of dollars in profit. We need to look after the little people, and over the past seven years we have been putting record money into social services and things such as Aboriginal lands and, while there is still plenty of work to be done, as a state we can be proud of the work we are doing in those areas. It is not necessarily about the biggest business. When the smallest individual is doing well and living in better conditions than six years ago when we came to power, that is the true judge of a good society. So I think at all levels we are doing the work—in the top end of town, and also for the poorest people in our community.

It is not just the commentators who are picking up on this and it is not just the accolades that we get from the business community, but it is also the people whom the Liberals might have hoped to convince to come and stand for election to this place in the future. Instead, we have had people coming in here saying, 'You should see the line-up we will have running in Mawson in 2010. We have some great and talented people who are champing at the bit to get in and run for the Liberal Party.' But the Liberal Party brand is so on the nose that they cannot get anyone to put up their hand. In the seat of Mawson Kym Richardson was elected unopposed to the Liberal Party candidacy because no-one else wanted the job. He is a failed federal member who did nothing in the three years that he was in Canberra purportedly representing the people of Kingston. So he is a failed federal candidate and he is the only person the Liberal Party could get to put their hand up.

Joe Scalzi is running again. Talk about attention deficit disorder! What is it with these people? Can't they realise that they were part of a dreadful Brown-Olsen-Kerin reign of sell-offs and privatisation and just be done with it and go off and sit on their retirement packages and pensions and not pop their head up again? They achieved absolutely nothing in this place. We see Trish Draper, another failed federal member of parliament. All she seemed to do was grizzle about being in parliament the whole time she was there. She has got the government pension and is now putting up her hand for another slice of the pie.

The Liberal Party brand is so on the nose in this state, if that is the best this party can do to attract candidates, we may soon see the death of the Liberal Party. That would be a pity, because it is good to have healthy opposition, and I wonder what that great socialist premier Sir Thomas Playford would have thought if, after doing so much to build this state and put infrastructure in place, he had seen the sell-off by his descendants in the Liberal Party during those terribly dark days in the 1990s, when these economic bandits got in and sold our state up the creek. We have come in and, as I said, basically rebuilt this state from the bootstraps up, in terms of social wellbeing right through to putting in the infrastructure.

I would particularly like to pay tribute to our Minister for Transport and Minister for Infrastructure. He has held the line over several years as the money was put into police to get law and order back in check and to fix our health problems—the hospitals which had been sold off and the health system which had been run down. We had to put money into the education system because the Liberals went around the state closing down school after school. And all the time Patrick sat there.

We had a plan in 2004, when I was working with the minister. We sat down and burnt the midnight oil with every single department to come up with an infrastructure plan. We also sat down with the private sector and mapped out a plan to build infrastructure for this state. If one looks at that document, one will see that the framework for the measures that we have been able to announce this year was set in the Infrastructure Plan that we released in 2005.

We put long hours into that. We knew that the money could not all be spent in a single budget because, just like running a household budget, you cannot do everything that you want to do in one year. We had a long-term vision for this state. We knew that it was in a deplorable condition after 8½ years of Liberal mismanagement. This is now all coming to fruition, and I want to congratulate the Minister for Transport for holding the line and for his vision. It is a wonderful vision and, as I said before, history will be the greatest judge. I believe that, when we look back on this era, it will be held up as one of great eras in this great state's history.

I attended a Property Council breakfast function a few weeks ago and someone from the private sector said, 'What this government has done by getting out there and really encouraging people to go and look for mineral resources will not bring about a mining boom; it will take this state to another level.' It is not a boom that will bust in a few years. It will take us to a level where this state will stay year after year, decade after decade, and from that position we will have the money—the royalties—to invest in our police force and to grow our transport department and infrastructure even further.

This all paints a very bright picture for South Australia and, again, I want to commend the Premier, the Minister for Health, the Minister for Transport, the Minister for Education and Children's Services and, of course, the Treasurer, who has to go through documents with a fine toothcomb each year and decide which money will be in and which money will be out. I think we have shown great discipline over the past seven years to deliver seven successive surplus budgets and, as I said, I think history will show that this has, indeed, been a great era in South Australia's history.

However, having said that, now is no time to give up. We need to be out there and continue to listen to the community and deliver what this community wants without any sense of arrogance or losing touch with the people. I think we have done that very well over the past six years. We want to keep our ear to the ground, our finger on the pulse and deliver on the community's needs.

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (20:55): Mr Speaker, you might have imagined the budget as being a document about which one would expect accolades from members of the party that forms government and areas of criticism from members of the opposition, and that has largely been the case in the preceding speeches. There is a little light on the hill that I wish to acknowledge as the member for Bragg and for which I want to express my appreciation to the government, and that is the announcement this year of a $2 million plus extension of facilities at the Kensington Centre. The Kensington Centre is an educational facility in my electorate that provides for special children with high needs, and I recently had the privilege of welcoming a number of them to Parliament House.

However, I note that the centre is in a part of my electorate which, at the time the project will come to fruition, in December 2010, will form part of the electorate of Norwood, and the political cynic in me would question why, after all these years, I get a project for Kensington Centre and it is about to go into a neighbouring electorate. However, I will look forward to attending the opening of this new extension and facility for secure play areas with the new member for Norwood, Mr Steven Marshall, in December 2010.

On the other hand, the people of Bragg are used to receiving very little provision for our electorate. It is usual for me as the member to peruse the budget and find nothing for the people of Bragg. I am quite used to that. But is it not interesting that, when we have a new Prime Minister who describes climate change and water and the like as the biggest moral issue facing the state, the country and the universe, there is very little provision for the capturing of stormwater from the eastern suburbs? I understand from the reports I have read that every year there is enough water run-off in my electorate to water the whole of Adelaide. Project after project of stormwater initiatives to capture and harvest some of this run-off has been presented to the government to ensure that we can water our parklands and to make sure that the people in the electorates of the member for Torrens and the member for Unley are not flooded every year.

However, what is completely missing is any infrastructure project to rebuild the road in Waterfall Gully, where a cyclist from Unley was killed. The government has refused to fix that road and resolve that infrastructure issue. However, there is nothing—not even the $10 million plan that was proposed for Glenside as an extension of the detention dam, which would harvest an enormous amount of water and would enable it to be released slowly to reduce the flooding problems and also to pump it into an aquifer in the south-east Parklands.

These are projects worth $10 million, or probably $15 million, which would be a massive contribution to the water security issue which we need to face and address, not only to protect the River Murray but also to ensure that we have sufficient water for critical human needs and for environmental, commercial and farming purposes.

Is it not incredible that, instead of these important projects, I note that in the Premier's investment program, with respect to his portfolio in the Department of the Premier and Cabinet, $8.3 million will be spent this year as the preliminary to a $44.77 million project at the Glenside Hospital? We heard from the Hon. Gail Gago, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, that we had to sell off 42 per cent of the Glenside Hospital, even though there was no documentation and no basis to support why it was necessary to place more private housing, a supermarket or other commercial purposes above the urgent need for extended services for mental health patients, not just in-house acute care but also supported accommodation.

The priority of the government, which I read in the Premier's new works project, is to have an Adelaide film and screen hub to which he has allocated $44.77 million. After the Hon. Gail Gago, through her representatives at public meetings, said that the sale of 42 per cent of this site is not negotiable and that it was necessary to enable the redevelopment to go ahead, we find that $44.77 million is going to be spent on a film hub.

I have looked at the Hendon property which the South Australian Film Corporation currently occupies. It is an expansive property for the purposes of film production and the like; I think it is an excellent facility. For whatever reason the government wants to dump that property—sell it off, flog it off, or make it into housing or whatever—it is no justification whatsoever for the Premier and his department to spend this sort of money on relocating a perfectly good facility (the Film Corporation) from its Hendon site. I want to highlight the small print. The small print is absolutely extraordinary because in tiny print at the bottom of this is a footnote:

Total project cost includes construction costs of $42.3 million and $2.5 million for the purchase of land from the Department of Health. In addition, $680,000 budgeted expenditure for shared car parking facilities is included in the Health Portfolio (Glenside Campus Redevelopment).

So, we find that the government, through the health department, is selling the whole of the cultural precinct, which forms part of the site, to the Premier at a cost of $2.5 million. It forms part of the Glenside Hospital site, so it is not only the 42 per cent that has been flogged off to a supermarket and private housing, but in addition to that the whole of the cultural precinct is going to be purchased by the Premier.

Where is the valuation, I say, that justifies the Premier buying a large slice of the Glenside Hospital site for $2.5 million to put in his identified preferred tenant for this building? I think the government and the Premier need to explain what the basis of this is when the mental health minister has been out there telling the public that she needs to sell off half this property to finance a facility for mental health patients—a statewide service for people across South Australia—yet more of it is going to be flogged off to the Premier to facilitate this transfer of his preferred tenant. We need some explanation of this.

I discovered today that they have said they are going to proceed anyway before the select committee has finished on the inquiry into this, before we have had the Auditor-General's response on his inquiry into the Chapley deal, before we have had the determination by the National Trust on whether the property is at risk, and before we have had the Ombudsman's response in relation to the nondisclosure of documents on this site in relation to the redevelopment of Glenside Hospital, to which so far the government has snubbed its nose in relation to the select committee.

Today, I found that they are pulling down the laundry property at the Glenside Hospital. They have started to demolish this property which has been listed on two heritage lists. They have the audacity to start bulldozing the site before the select committee has even finished this inquiry. It shows utter contempt for this parliament and its process, for its responsibility to the people of South Australia. It is time the Premier came in here to answer a few of these questions and place on the table his explanation for what is a gross waste of public money in favour of his preferred mates to the exclusion and detriment of the thousands of people in this state who suffer from mental health problems. It is an utter disgrace and we want an explanation.

Ms BEDFORD (Florey) (21:05): We live in an ever-changing world. Very little now is as it was and change seems to be upon us everywhere and in everything we do. It is a time when communities need to be resilient and work together to take advantage of every opportunity. South Australia is well-placed to be part of the success of the future. This government has worked hard to foster mining, defence technology, tourism, and training and employment among many things while working hard to provide the best education and health services possible.

The State Strategic Plan is the blueprint for an exciting future. In supporting the Appropriation Bill, I acknowledge the efforts of ministers and their staff to maintain the balance between strong fiscal discipline and new directions in service provision. This budget delivers improved services to South Australia in many areas. In Florey, residents will benefit from improved coverage by the Metropolitan Fire Service via its increased staffing and the building of the new Beulah Park station—an important link for call-out times in the north-eastern suburbs. Modbury Public Hospital's role in the public health system will grow as additional funding comes on line to provide extra services, especially in elective surgery.

In the important area of family and community services, the Modbury Regional Office will take on a new enlarged role in the north-eastern suburbs and maintain and enhance its wide range of services. In education, a highlight for our area will be Modbury High School's continuing to work on the plans for the commencement of their new arts centre. They also play an important role in music in our area and it is my privilege every year to accompany their stage band to Mount Gambier for the Generations in Jazz competition where this year we were placed third in their division.

As we all have seen, public transport is the focus of infrastructure in this budget and in the north-east we will see new buses come into service on our O-Bahn line to the city which also services the Adelaide Airport—itself a recent winner of an award for its dynamic design. There are also a great many groups in the Florey electorate that will benefit from funding opportunities provided in this year's budget.

Groups like the University of the Third Age now will establish on the site of Modbury Primary School, the old building being transferred with the help of the education department, the Land Management Corporation and the Tea Tree Gully Council.

University of the Third Age provides dozens of courses to the now record number of seniors who are part of this vibrant example of lifelong learning. As part of this development, the Tea Tree Gully toy library has now moved into its new premises within the City of Tea Tree Gully library providing an expanded service to the young families in our area. Young people are also well served by the excellent community child-care centres in the Florey area, and I would like to thank the staff and management committees of the Lurra Community Child Care Centre and the Modbury Community Child Care Centre, located near the TAFE site at Tea Tree Gully.

The TAFE site at Tea Tree Gully is another great resource for our area providing excellent further education opportunities that complement the courses running in our local high schools, helping to prepare our children for fulfilling paid employment. I would like to mention here in passing how impressed I was to see the wide range of projects from the students at the Valley View Secondary School at their recent C2C open night. Students and staff are to be congratulated on the standard and quality of the projects that were on display.

The Premier's Reading Challenge and Active Challenges, of course, continue to provide another opportunity for primary students to excel at literacy and to encourage healthy lifestyles. I would also like to mention the excellent work in science being undertaken by students at Para Vista School. They have attracted a great deal of warranted kudos for their work.

The largest employment sector in Florey is the retail sector and, in these tough times, I would like to make particular mention of the work done by small business owners and acknowledge their contribution to the economy. In saying this, I would also like to thank shop assistants for their work. They certainly make our lives a lot easier (particularly the 9 to 5 people) because they work out of hours to provide us with more opportunities to shop over the weekend and at late-night shopping times.

Another important role in the community is that of the sporting groups and the thousands of volunteers who put so many hours into providing recreation for all, either playing or watching—something in which I excel. One of my greatest pleasures is seeing our young people and veterans (when they come out, of course) improving in their chosen areas, and calisthenics is particularly strong in Florey along with all the other well-known sports such as netball, basketball, cricket, AFL, soccer and all the other football codes, including gridiron, as well as hockey and table tennis, just to name a few.

We are all also very grateful for the work of churches in our community and, as this is Refugee Week, I would like to finish off by acknowledging the work of the Modbury Uniting Church and their running of the African Women's Group. Many people work tirelessly to provide assistance in many areas to help large family groups learn about the different culture that is Australia. It is a joy to see the families with lots of small children and babies as they begin to understand their new life here in South Australia.

When you hear their stories, and know how many struggles they have had to come to Australia, you know how lucky we are not only to live in this country but especially to be in South Australia where so much is available to those who want to be part of such a wonderful community.

Mr PEDERICK (Hammond) (21:10): I rise tonight to make my contribution to the AAA budget—not the AAA credit rating that the Treasurer thinks he has got but the budget that is all about Adelaide. There is absolutely nothing—I stress, nothing—in this budget for regional South Australia. As I said in my earlier contribution, the Labor Party only have a map of South Australia which ends at Gepps Cross and Glen Osmond. There is nothing outside those areas if you go through the budget papers to see essential allocations of money to country and regional areas.

As I have said before, the people in the Riverland, the people in the Lower Murray around Murray Bridge and the people in the Lower Lakes are really suffering from the inattention of Labor governments, both state and federal—it is just atrocious that this goes on. There are people who cannot afford to buy water to sustain their irrigation and people who cannot access their water. I had a meeting only today with agriculture minister McEwen about the Jervois footy club, which needs to put in infrastructure to access water for their oval.

All they need is a $28,000 grant, coupled with the $28,000 that the community are putting in and the 13 gigalitres of pledged water from local irrigators, to keep their oval going. Jervois is a little town that supports sporting clubs, bowling clubs, netball clubs, football clubs—about 450 different people use these club facilities in a little place like Jervois.

Do you know what the minister said to me today? He said, 'If the government put any funding toward it, why would we fund something that might become a stranded asset?'—a pipeline that would go 1.1 kilometres into the river to support the Jervois Football Club's oval.

Because, strange as it may seem, what has happened at Jervois is what has happened with the present health minister who, once he has stuffed up natural resources, has managed to give country health a belting. Through his management, or rather, mismanagement of natural resources with the so-called rehabilitation of the Lower Murray swamps, now they cannot access a waste water channel at the back of those swamps so they have to go this 1.1 kilometres for water. The minister said to me that the government will not put in funding for what may be a stranded asset if there is no water allocation or no water available. I said, 'Well, minister, if that happens no one would access water for themselves and do any work for it.'

It is interesting to note that I had a conversation with people at DWLBC who admitted that the trenchers were turning up to dig the privately-funded pipeline to Langhorne Creek and that was going to start today. I found that very interesting. These are just people who are trying to get on with their lives and trying to keep their communities viable.

I get back to health, and we saw hundreds of people protesting out the front today. There was no difference really to the protest that was here yesterday—thousands of teachers protesting against the Labor government, members of the Australian Education Union.

Today we had country communities out in force. I had quite a few phone calls from people who said, 'We can't make the trip. We are too busy out here surviving, but give everyone our best. We support the program.' They know only too well that they have been cut off in this budget, and they know that it is an absolute fabrication if minister Hill thinks fewer people will access services in Adelaide. The simple fact is that there is a great part of this state between Berri and Whyalla—hundreds and thousands of square kilometres of this state where people live and try to run their lives.

I talked about mining in my contribution earlier today. We talk about the big mines—Roxby, Prominent Hill—and I notice that the member for Stuart talked about what could happen in this area with the Leigh Creek mine (run by NRG) and other associated interests. Where will people go when they need health services? The have the Australian Zircon mine at Mindarie. It takes them three quarters of an hour to get to Loxton, and they have more than that—an hour and 10 minutes—to get to Berri. There is no point ducking back to Karoonda, a half an hour away, for health services if this plan goes through, because there will not be anyone there. There will not be a doctor. The doctor from Karoonda was in the chamber today during question time, and he is just appalled at what is going on.

Right throughout the outer regions of Mallee we have had trouble attracting doctors. If they do not have any services to supply, there will be no reason for them to go there. I reflect again on what has happened in Strathalbyn. Where will people from Clayton, Milang, Langhorne Creek and those areas go for health services? They will end up going to Mount Barker, which will be fully loaded, because there will not be any room for people, and then they will have to go to Adelaide anyway.

I want to make a comment about the Mobilong Prison upgrade near Murray Bridge. The government gave in-principle support for adequate public transport, to help supply infrastructure for stormwater, maintain roads and other infrastructure programs, and to make a decent contribution to the Rural City of Murray Bridge. The government has to come through with its word. If it wants to run state facilities—the women's prison, the men's prison, high security prisons, and the forensic mental health facility—the government needs to come good, and do not think the Rural City of Murray Bridge will just stand by and get along without any assistance.

I want to again reflect on transport in the Mallee and the Coorong at the moment. In a letter that a constituent wrote to minister Hill it states:

I would like to bring to your attention here at Meningie, situated at the Lower Lakes, that we have just found out that the Transport Advisory Board has recommended not to renew the contract for the public transport from Meningie to Murray Bridge. This service will cease on 30 June 2008.

I need not tell you how important public transport is to our community. You may think how does this concern you. As our community is under enough stress, and to lose this essential service, it seems that the rural communities have to accept a lesser standard. There are people living east of the tollgate. So I would like to challenge you and your public servants to back up your proposals published in the new South Australian Country Health care Plan, section 4, page 18, under the heading, 'Better Transport and Improved Coordinated Care (the Patient Journey)'.

'Transport and accommodation support will be developed to help country people access the health care services they need.'

The Patient Journey Initiative has already improved coordination of care and appropriate discharge planning for patients who need to access health services in other locations to ensure a smooth transition of care between services and locations. This initiative uses patient liaison network members, rural liaison nurses, patient transport coordinators and local practice nurses to support rural people to access health services.

We will:

Explore ways to increase transport options which can incorporate the existing Patient Assistance Transport Scheme.

Improve access to transport and accommodation subsidies and support when using both metropolitan and country services.

That is all very interesting, isn't it, when we have a government that is threatening to cut the funding to the Coorong services that run out to the Mallee down the coast road to Meningie and down the Dukes Highway to Culburra.

I indicated in my contribution last night that last week I sought a meeting with minister Conlon on this issue, and minister Caica on the other side laughed, thinking, 'Oh, yeah, that'll happen.' I must say that minister Conlon and I have a working business relationship. He did say last time that perhaps we need to have a monthly appointment, and I said, 'Yes. I'll book that in right now, minister.' It seems that I should have, but at least he is giving me the time at 11 o'clock tomorrow to discuss this issue with the operator of the service at Coonalpyn and some concerned parents of students who ride on one of the buses—and I commend my contribution.

Time expired.

Mr GRIFFITHS (Goyder) (21:21): Again it is a pleasure being in this house making a brief contribution in regards to the budget for the 2008-09 and the period beyond that. When The Plains Producer, which is a newspaper published around the Balaclava Adelaide plains area, asked me for a comment about what I thought about the budget I simplified it down to one word: 'abandoned', as it relates to regional South Australia. I do not use the word abandoned lightly, but, from my perspective that is what it really is.

I have tried to identify as many aspects of the budget as I can that actually relate to South Australia and the regions, and I just cannot find very many. There is some money for shoulder widening; there is a little bit of money for road improvements, but that is just a pittance of what it needs to be. I think in total it is something like $40 million over the four-year period. But we know even from a couple of years ago from budget figures produced by the RAA that there was a $200 million backlog for road maintenance required then. The regions need so much money. About 30 per cent of the people who live in South Australia live in regional South Australia, but they do not necessarily get the return.

I have a quote from a lady whom I know quite well. She is from my electorate. She was out the front earlier today. She was one of about 70 people from Yorke Peninsula who jumped on two buses and came over here and wanted to have a strong voice about regional health.

Mrs Geraghty: You have already said this.

Mr GRIFFITHS: I know. This is a very different comment, though. She said to me—and this lady has a very strong way of expressing herself:

Steven, I want you to tell those people in there that we're going to refuse to pay our taxes unless our hospitals actually get cared for.

They have a large property. They would put an enormous amount of taxpayer dollars into the economy. They have been farming for a long time. They have been very successful at it. They would spend money on a variety of things and they are just sick of it. They want to ensure that regional hospitals get the support they need. She was saying to me that, 'I'm not paying taxes to the state anymore. That's it. I'm prepared to pay the equivalent of what I would pay in taxes I'll pay to the hospital at Maitland to make sure that it stays open to the level that they want to.' We all know that that is very difficult to do, but that is the sort of passion that exists within many sections of the community.

Since the budget has come down there is one letter that I will read into Hansard. It is from a chap by the name of Newton Lines, who is the president of the Hamley Bridge Football Club. Hamley Bridge is on the extreme eastern end of the Goyder electorate, but they are wonderful people there. He states:

As president of the Hamley Bridge Football Club it is with great interest that I hear in the news that there is $100 million to be spent on AAMI Stadium and $5 million to be spent on Port Power and the Adelaide Crows.

I think Hamley Bridge Football Club celebrated its centenary last year, so they have been playing footy there for 100 years. He further states:

To a football club like Hamley Bridge these sorts of figures are like telephone numbers.

I think that is a pretty good description, actually:

The Adelaide Plains Football League complains that our change rooms are too small. The ladies would like to have decent toilets and change rooms with showers.

By that I think they mean netball players:

We desperately need a new mower to mow the oval as the old one is dangerous as the blades sometimes go flying off, it keeps breaking down and at best does a very poor job in mowing the oval.

We don't need anything like $100 million, but we do need some money. This is grass roots football where we cultivate and develop juniors who may one day play league football or AFL. We are volunteers who work tirelessly to keep the club going. For example, my wife and I on home match days start at about 8am and work through the day until about 8pm. The satisfaction of seeing 100 footballers playing our great game is enormous. We have A grade, B grade, senior colts, junior colts, modifieds and mini modifieds. There are five A grade netball teams and four junior teams. That is close on 70 girls playing netball.

Our kids deserve to have nice facilities, safe facilities, and to be quite frank the Power and the Crows do almost nothing for us. Why should the rich fat cats have the facilities at AAMI Stadium upgraded at the taxpayers' expense while our volunteers at the Hamley Bridge Football Club have to bust—

I will not use the next word—

...dip into their pockets to keep our club going? Rumour is around that we will have to pay a $1,000 affiliation fee to the SANFL next year.

His closing comment is:

Come on, for the sake of our kids playing football what about doing something for us as well.

I think that is fairly apt and it demonstrates the way that people in regional South Australian feel about a lot of things. Those in the regions volunteer their time in so many different ways; people work on the ambulances and people work in community groups. We have all had the chance in our time in parliament to attend hand-over dinners for Rotary, Apex and Lions and these are all wonderful people who do tremendous work in the community.

Every sporting group and every volunteer group that exists in the regions need to feel wanted and need to feel supported. Their feeling is now that the budget that has come down for 2008-09 and across the forward estimate period does not do that for them and they are frustrated and they want to start to see a reasonable level of return on the investment that they make to the state to come back to them and certainly they do not feel that. That is why I come back to that word abandoned again. It is a pretty good description I think.

I have also had a letter from the Combined Progress Associations of Yorke Peninsula. This group has representation from something like the 26 progress associations which are within one of the council areas that I represent. These people also work hard. I know one chap who has been a member of a progress association for 50 years. They want to ensure that their hospitals remain open. They have given me a very detailed letter, which is a copy of a letter which has gone to the Premier and I know many people who are intending to try to telephone the Premier's office, they want to write to the Premier, they want to email to the Premier because they want the Premier to understand and be accountable for the decisions that are made by government.

These people get very upset. They are working hard. This chap who is president of this group lives in Port Victoria. As a community Port Victoria alone has raised $42,000 to try to provide a building for doctors to come to and consult, but they are fearful that if the process of GP Plus centres goes ahead, that the GPs that might be in that area would move, therefore making their investment worthless because there will not be the GPs to provide a service to them. We need in this house to ensure that we respond to all South Australians. It is important when we prepare a budget that uses thirteen and a half billion dollars of the community's money that we share that wealth around.

The people who have spoken to me since the budget has come down understand that with the overwhelming majority of the state based around metropolitan Adelaide, that an enormous component of those dollars needs to be expended in the metropolitan area. They understand that. They understand that public transport needs to be provided too, but they are fearful and very upset by the fact that there never seems to be that return. We all know and presumably everyone in this house has got country cousins at least and they have had the chance to visit small towns and they have had the chance to visit farms and they can see good people.

Mr Pederick: But you'd better not get crook.

Mr GRIFFITHS: Yes, the member for Hammond says, 'You'd better not get crook,' though, and that's true. But all these people deserve the support and, as a reasonably new member of parliament, only having been here for two years, but one who believes in his community, I am always going to try to stand up for the needs of the regions because that is what I love. I never want to have to live in Adelaide permanently. I always want to ensure that I can relate to the electorate in which I serve by living in the electorate that I serve.

An honourable member: Hear, hear!

Mr GRIFFITHS: We all say 'Hear, hear,' because that is what our intention is. Not all members of this place can say the same thing.

Finally, I will talk about some of the very pressing needs of the electorate. I know that water is in crisis in this state; there is no doubt about that. The member for Hammond and every member of this place who has an electorate that has anything to do with the River Murray and those affected by the Murray, puts to us all the time the devastation—

Mr Venning: And the member for Schubert.

Mr GRIFFITHS: And the member for Schubert—the devastation that is being felt in the Riverland. We were there in late December I think. As a parliamentary party quite a few of us went up and met with people who were affected by it. While I know the indications for them are immense, I want to ensure that the government sees that it is necessary to invest in infrastructure that will give a better reticulated water supply to the other regions of the state too. Technology is available through desalination to provide potable water. In the Goyder electorate an immense future awaits us and a bright and prosperous one, if you have access to a better water supply.

Mr Venning: There's a lot of seawater.

Mr GRIFFITHS: Exactly; the member for Schubert says, 'There's a lot of seawater.' It surrounds us, there is about 1,200 kilometres of coastline in my electorate alone. The opportunities are there to do something.

I ask the government to investigate any possibility for desalination technology which will remove our reliance on the River Murray and allow water we currently take from the River Murray to be used for environmental flows and, importantly, by the irrigators in the Riverland who need support, the people in the Lower Lakes who have been devastated by everything and everyone who derives an income from anything in the River Murray.

We need to ensure that we support all communities. If we can get a better water supply into the Goyder electorate, it will allow business to expand, industries to come there that have not had a prior opportunity and quality residential developments to be built. I do not want to focus solely on Port Hughes because exciting developments are happening right across the Goyder electorate, but we need a better water supply to make them a reality. It is part of the infrastructure challenge of this state. Let us make sure that we start to develop the visions that will supply not only water but also improved roads, power and public transport options in regional areas. A lot of things need to be done.

Mr VENNING (Schubert) (21:31): As whip I am proud to finish off the debate for our excellent team. I am proud to be their whip. They all are doing a fantastic job. I have been here for a fair while so I am a fair judge of that. Before I conclude today—a day when country health became the issue of the week—I want to clear up a few misrepresentations.

As whip I refute absolutely the insinuation that I called 'state of the house' to get a quorum for my leader for his reply on the budget. The contrary is true. I called 'state of the house' (or a quorum) to get the bells ringing to get government members in here. I gave instructions to my good deputy behind me to keep our members out until enough government members were in here. All members of the opposition came in here when all government members were in here—and all the opposition members stayed in here. It was sad that only seven out of 32 government members remained in here.

Madam Deputy Speaker, the member for Hammond will tell you that his instructions were to go outside that door and to keep opposition members out until government members were in here. That was the instruction given by me.

Mrs GERAGHTY: I have a point of order. This appears to have nothing to do with the budget—and I might just say that it is really appalling when you have to call a quorum to get people to come to listen to your leader.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: There is no a point of order.

Ms Simmons interjecting:

Mr PEDERICK: I have a point of order: the member for Morialta is interjecting while she is not in her place.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: That is a point of order. Member for Morialta, either go to your place or cease interjecting, but if you go to your place and interject it is still against standing orders.

Mr VENNING: I thought it was good manners that, when the Treasurer delivered the budget in this house on budget day, we were all in here and we sat in silence.

Mrs Geraghty: You were not all here.

Mr VENNING: I believe they were all here; they were not supposed to be absent. I thought it would good manners if it was reciprocated—no such luck. It was poor form, arrogance in the extreme. I did note who did stay today. Some seven members of the government have principles—they stayed and listened. I want to put that issue to rest. It is true. I have been here a while. That tactic is well known and commonly used. Any blame or criticism belongs with me.

I congratulate my leader on a great performance and a great speech in his reply to the budget. He gives me great confidence. The philosophical comments of the Treasurer tonight were quite extraordinary, especially when he reflected badly on both the Bannon and Arnold governments. Members should read this in Hansard. He used to work for premier Arnold. I will not hear criticism of him. He was a straight person. He was handed the poisoned chalice. He was handed leadership of the Labor Party and led the Labor government to oblivion. It was not his fault. He took it like a man and I will forever admire him for that—more than I can say for those who have followed him.

I used to advise minister Arnold when he was minister for agriculture, so I have always had a lot of time for him. I thought it was poor form to tackle him like that. He took the wrap for the State Bank debt, but it was not just his fault.

The Treasurer gave me some gratuitous advice about whether or not I should be here. I remind him—and all members—that I am not here at my own behest but, rather, for the people—wise or unwise—who support me. Do members think I have not asked that question? Of course, I have asked that question. I am 62 and I have been here 18 years. I am the whip and I hope my experience will assist this wonderful group of people over here to form in government 2010. I have much admiration for my leader Martin Hamilton-Smith. He has what is needed to lead us for the next 18 months and then the state after that. When the father of the house (Hon. Graham Gunn) leaves us in 2010, we will miss him but I could be a link because of my experience in past campaigns for this place. I hope my services be will be valuable.

I am encouraged by our newer members and I look forward to seeing them build long and meritorious political careers; and members heard one of them speak tonight just before me. I hope they are given the privilege in 2010 to govern for all South Australians. Let us hope they can take over the Treasury bench without inheriting huge government debt which will blunt their ability to perform at their full potential.

I thought the speech tonight from the member for Mawson was quite extraordinary. What a lot of rubbish! The guy is totally in denial. State debt is climbing every day and he says that it is great to see the government back and the state in good economic hands. Well, the government is going the same way as it did with the State Bank. It will hand over the Treasury bench to a new government with a much higher debt than when it took over—and nothing to show for it. What a lot of rubbish. State debt is going up—and that is an unrefuted fact.

I was heartened today to see country people come to town to rally in support of their country hospitals. It is great to see people here who do not usually involve themselves in the political process. I saw a lot of people I know personally who have never voted Liberal in their life. Three or four of them are strong card-carrying members of the Labor Party. I admire them for that—good friends, always have been, born into it. I said to them, 'It's good to see you here today. Can I ask you to do one thing? You write a letter privately to your Labor MPs and your Labor friends and tell them that this is hurting you. Do not put up with it.' It is not a political issue for them. It is an issue that confronts them and their community, and that is us. This is a downgrade of services that we currently enjoy. 'GP Plus' are becoming very dirty words; 43 hospitals are so inflicted with that horrible term and we have only 11 community hospitals.

These GP Plus clinics will kill many of the 43 hospitals. I was born in Crystal Brook hospital, as was my father, as was his father, and they all died there, and I hope that I will die there. These places are sacred to each one of us and our communities for all sorts of reasons. They are pivotal in country communities. If you do not think this will happen, if you think this is a political game, do not take my word for it or the word of the members for Hammond and Goyder, go and ask the ordinary people. Go and ask your own supporters who live in these communities. Go and ask them. Please, ask them. This is not political. Just ask them. They feel really threatened by this.

I have still got time for minister Hill even though we had a bit of a stoush. I believe that his bureaucrats have totally overtaken his judgment and are ruling the day for him. All I can say is that the rural people today have spoken. I just plead that the government will listen to them and act because you just cannot put the economic scrutiny over little country communities. I note that the Treasurer has walked in. You just cannot say, 'Well, this hospital is not efficient, this hospital is not viable, purely because it is hundreds of kilometres from anywhere.' They are there for the strategic reason to provide that community with the security, safety and the realisation that people can stay in that community knowing that, if they get sick, they can get help, otherwise older people will have to move out of some of these communities.

I cannot believe that astute politicians can come up with stuff like this that allow their bureaucrats to say, 'Well, we'll save the government money. We'll put the knife through all these country communities, because there are no votes there for us.' I note that the member for Giles is not in this house today. As I said yesterday, I am quite upset and concerned that both the member for Mount Gambier and the member for Chaffey sat over there and did not mention one word of support for the country people who came here today, not one.

Mrs GERAGHTY: I rise on a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. My point of order is that constantly throughout his contribution, the honourable member referred to members who are not in the chamber or who are leaving the chamber. He has been using those kinds of phrases. My understanding is that it is against standing orders to do so; and, because it has been something that has been quite common practice, particularly today, I think we do need a ruling on it so that it is not a practice that continues.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member for Torrens raises a valid point of order. It is not in order to refer to the presence or absence of members from the chamber. The member for Schubert's time has expired.

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY (Port Adelaide—Deputy Premier, Treasurer, Minister for Industry and Trade, Minister for Federal/State Relations) (21:41): I guess that, if I speak, I close the debate. Ivan, comrade. What I have learned from the Liberal Party now is that you are more of a comrade than I am. The member for Ashford is shocked by that admission; but, in the last couple of years, I am not quite sure where the left sits and where the right sits.

The Hon. S.W. Key: I know where I sit.

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: And no-one is ever in doubt. The good thing about the member for Ashford is that no-one is ever left wondering where her philosophical views sit. There is one thing about the member for Schubert: he has been arguing from the backbench for as long as I have been in here. You are eloquent and you are lively. You should have taken up that offer I gave you back in 2002. Let us be honest, you were tempted.

Mr Venning: I might have if the Attorney-General hadn't dobbed me in.

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: He was tempted.

Mr Venning: He dobbed me into Brindal!

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: It may not have been one of my finest moments—

The Hon. J.W. Weatherill interjecting:

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: Agriculture. Perhaps we can have, as the Premier often says, breaking news.

Members interjecting:

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: Okay, we will not have breaking news.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Treasurer, I have bad news for you. You are not entitled to be speaking. Unfortunately, because he moved the motion, the Treasurer is considered to have already spoken. Unfortunately, as the Treasurer did not take his whole time possible, no other minister can speak. However, another honourable member may take the opportunity.

Mr VENNING: Madam Deputy Speaker, on a point of clarification, does that go on the record?

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: It does.

Mr VENNING: What I said does go on the record?

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: It does.

Mr VENNING: Okay, I am pleased with that.

Motion carried.

Estimates Committees

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY (Port Adelaide—Deputy Premier, Treasurer, Minister for Industry and Trade, Minister for Federal/State Relations) (21:44): I move:

That the proposed payments for the departments and services contained in the Appropriation Bill be referred to Estimates Committees A and B for examination and report by Thursday 3 July 2008, in accordance with the following timetables:

APPROPRIATION BILL

TIMETABLE FOR ESTIMATES COMMITTEES

ESTIMATES COMMITTEE A

25-30 June & 1-2 July 2008

WEDNESDAY 25 JUNE AT 9.00 AM

Premier

Minister for Economic Development

Minister for Social Inclusion

Minister for the Arts

Minister for Sustainability and Climate Change

Minister Assisting the Premier in Cabinet Business and Public Sector Management

Minister Assisting the Minister for the Arts

House of Assembly

Joint Parliamentary Services

Legislative Council

State Governor's Establishment

Department of the Premier and Cabinet (part)

Administered Items for the Department of the Premier and Cabinet (part)

Department of Trade and Economic Development (part)

Auditor-General's Department

Arts SA

Treasurer

Department of Treasury and Finance (part)

Administered Items for the Department of Treasury and Finance (part)

THURSDAY 26 JUNE AT 11.30 AM

Minister for Industry and Trade

Department of Trade and Economic Development (part)

Defence SA

Office of the Venture Capital Board

Attorney-General

Minister for Multicultural Affairs

Minister for Justice

Attorney-General's Department (part)

Administered Items for the Attorney-General's Department (part)

Courts Administration Authority

State Electoral Office

FRIDAY 27 JUNE AT 11.00 AM

Minister for Recreation, Sport and Racing

Minister for Industrial Relations

Minister for Finance and Government Enterprises

Department of the Premier and Cabinet (part)

Administered Items for the Department of the Premier and Cabinet (part)

Department of Treasury and Finance (part)

Administered Items for the Department of Treasury and Finance (part)

Department for Transport, Energy and Infrastructure (part)

Administered Items for the Department for Transport, Energy and Infrastructure (part)

MONDAY 30 JUNE AT 11.00 AM

Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation

Minister for Ageing

Minister for Disability

Minister for Housing

Minister for Families and Communities

Department of the Premier and Cabinet (part)

Administered Items for the Department of the Premier and Cabinet (part)

Department for Families and Communities (part)

Administered Items for Department for Families and Communities (part)

TUESDAY 1 JULY AT 11.00 AM

Minister for Water Security

Minister for the River Murray

Minister Assisting the Minister for Industry and Trade

Minister for Small Business

Minister for Regional Development

Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation (part)

Administered Items for the Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation (part)

Department of Trade and Economic Development (part)

WEDNESDAY 2 JULY AT 11.00 AM

Minister for State/Local Government Relations

Minister for the Status of Women

Minister for Volunteers

Minister for Consumer Affairs

Department of Primary Industries and Resources (part)

Administered Items for the Department of Primary Industries and Resources (part)

Attorney-General's Department (part)

Administered Items for the Attorney-General's Department (part)


ESTIMATES COMMITTEE B

25-30 June & 1-2 July 2008

WEDNESDAY 25 JUNE AT 9.00 AM

Minister for Transport

Minister for Energy

Minister for Infrastructure

Department for Transport, Energy and Infrastructure (part)

Administered Items for the Department for Transport, Energy and Infrastructure (part)

TransAdelaide

Administered Items for the Department of Treasury and Finance (part)

Minister for Forests

Minister for Agriculture, Food and Fisheries

Department of Primary Industries and Resources (part)

Administered Items for the Department of Primary Industries and Resources (part)

THURSDAY 26 JUNE AT 9.00 AM

Minister for Police

Minister for Urban Development and Planning

Minister for Mineral Resources Development

South Australia Police (part)

Administered Items for South Australia Police (part)

Department of Primary Industries and Resources (part)

Administered Items for the Department of Primary Industries and Resources (part)

Minister for Tourism

South Australian Tourism Commission

Minister for Tourism

FRIDAY 27 JUNE AT 11.00 AM

Minister for Education and Children's Services Department of Education and Children's Services

Administered Items for the Department of Education and Children's Services

MONDAY 30 JUNE AT 11.00 AM

Minister for Youth

Minister for Gambling

Minister for Employment, Training and Further Education

Minister for Science and Information Economy

Department of Further Education, Employment, Science and Technology

Attorney-General's Department (part)

Administered Items for the Attorney-General's Department (part)

Department of Treasury and Finance (part)

Administered Items for the Department of Treasury and Finance (part)

Independent Gambling Authority

TUESDAY 1 JULY AT 9.00 AM

Minister for Health

Minister for the Southern Suburbs

Department of Health (part)

Administered Items for the Department of Health (part)

Department of Primary Industries and Resources (part)

Administered Items for the Department of Primary Industries and Resources (part)

Minister for Emergency Services

Minister for Correctional Services

Minister for Road Safety

Attorney-General's Department (part)

Administered Items for the Attorney-General's Department (part)

Department for Correctional Services

Department for Transport, Energy and Infrastructure (part)

Administered Items for Department for Transport, Energy and Infrastructure (part)

South Australia Police (part)

Administered Items for South Australia Police (part)

WEDNESDAY 2 JULY AT 11.00 AM

Minister for Environment and Conservation

Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse

Department for Environment and Heritage

Administered Items for the Department for Environment and Heritage

Environment Protection Authority

Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation (part)

Administered Items for the Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation (part)

Department of Health (part)

Motion carried.

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: I move:

That Estimates Committee A be appointed, consisting of Ms Ciccarello, Messrs Griffiths, Hamilton-Smith, Kenyon, Pederick and Piccolo, and Ms Thompson.

Motion carried.

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: I move:

That Estimates Committee B be appointed, consisting of Messrs Bignell and Goldsworthy, Ms Key, Mr Koutsantonis, Dr McFetridge, and Messrs Rau and Venning.

Motion carried.


At 21:48 the house adjourned until Thursday 19 June 2008 at 10:30.


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