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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-06-16 Daily Xml
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SWINE FLU

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (15:53): Today marks the date upon which 86 cases of influenza H1N1, commonly known as swine flu, have been confirmed in the South Australian population. Over the past month or so, the government, through the health department, has kept the public informed on an almost daily basis of the number of confirmed cases of this condition. The exercise of ensuring that the public are kept informed and kept calm and that the virus is contained is important.

Today again the minister provided a ministerial statement and an update on the swine flu situation. As those in the parliament are aware, he confirmed the passing of legislation this morning to enhance powers to deal with the management of a major health incident, disaster or emergency, yet this afternoon he announced that he did not expect that this legislation would need to be invoked for the purposes of the swine flu situation.

I find that absolutely incredible, given that the minister had impressed upon the opposition the need to pass this legislation rapidly. It makes a mockery of the parliamentary process to ask that something be done urgently under the guise of the need to deal with and manage a potential pandemic circumstance which is out of control when, as he identified in his statement today, he has the full knowledge that, in fact, this swine flu produces a mild illness just like seasonal flu and that he did not expect it to be any more serious.

Obviously, there is an issue of ensuring that until a vaccine is developed we have some management by containment of those who are contaminated, as the World Health Organisation tells us to do. Is it not incredible that just yesterday we found that, even though the government was rushing out a week ago to tell us that a 60 year old man had been hospitalised with swine flu having been confirmed in that patient, last week a pregnant woman was in the Flinders Medical Centre for three days—from Tuesday to Thursday—and was diagnosed while she was in there as having swine flu? There were all the issues in relation to potential contamination and, as the minister says, the prompt attention by health professionals to contain the situation once they found out about it, but he did not know about it, he tells us, until the end of the week. He is told about it, he claims, after the woman is released from hospital.

We have had daily reports from the minister and the health department to tell us who has swine flu and what schools have been closed down and that they are checking everyone coming through the airports; recommendations are put to the public travelling to certain destinations in the country or around the world that they should stay at home, be checked, etc.; pamphlets have gone out and there has been an advertising campaign about who not to sneeze on, etc.; yet we have a woman in a public hospital—one of the biggest in the state—for three days, and the minister does not even know about it, he tells us. Then, when he finds out about it, he has the gall to come in to the parliament today and tell us that when he was informed about it he wanted to compliment those who addressed the management of it at the time.

What gall for the minister to do this! We need to know every day what is the situation and, if people are in hospital identified and confirmed as being swine flu carriers, what region, town or suburb they live in. We do not need to know their names. Even today we have a situation with two suspected swine flu cases at the Mount Gambier hospital. The hospital rings up to say to the government, 'Can you tell us whether we've got this down here?' The answer is, 'No; we're not going to confirm it or deny it.' What a disgrace! The people in the South-East or anywhere else who have swine flu in their district, school, hospital or workplace need to know it, because they need to be sure that if they show signs they can get an assessment themselves and make sure they contain it. We do not have a hope in hell of containing any contagious disease unless we know about it.

Time expired.

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