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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-11-18 Daily Xml
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ROYAL ADELAIDE HOSPITAL

Mrs REDMOND (Heysen—Leader of the Opposition) (14:38): Again, my question is to the Premier. Why has the government changed its position on the rebuilding of the Royal Adelaide Hospital when it made a commitment to the rebuild as recently as the 2006-07 budget? The capital works statement for the 2006-07 budget states:

Royal Adelaide Hospital Redevelopment Stage 4. Completion due June 2011. Planning will continue in 2006-07 for redevelopment works that will include patient accommodation...

That is what you said, Premier.

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna—Minister for Health, Minister for the Southern Suburbs, Minister Assisting the Premier in the Arts) (14:39): Mr Speaker—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. J.D. HILL: One has to be rational about this debate.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The Minister for Health.

The Hon. J.D. HILL: Thank you, Mr Speaker. One has to be rational about this debate. The government's original position—and I have made this plain a number of times—was to rebuild on the existing site, the position that the Liberal Party is now putting. That was our position, too—

Mrs Redmond: Why did you change your mind?

The SPEAKER: The Leader of the Opposition!

The Hon. J.D. HILL: That was our position, and, yes, we did change our mind. Why did we change our mind? Because we went through a rational review of the two options. The—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! If members disagree with what the Minister for Health is saying, then there is an appropriate course of action to take and we have a debate on this issue. Perhaps really that is what the opposition wants to do, but as long as they are asking questions they have to give the minister an opportunity to respond and then, at a further stage, if they want to take issue with anything the minister has said, then there are means available to do that. The minister should be able to respond without having to shout over interjections disagreeing with what he is saying. The Minister for Health.

The Hon. J.D. HILL: Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I think it is generally true that both sides of politics, until we introduced our Health Care Plan in 2007, were of the view that the Royal Adelaide Hospital was where it was and we would just continue to upgrade it over time. That was the received view, I suppose, without any deep thought going into it. When we announced our Health Care Plan of 2007, we had gone through what the health needs were for our entire community over the next 20 or 30 years. We recognised that—and this is the advice to us from experts—there would be a huge growth in demand as a result of ageing of our population which meant we needed more capacity and we needed to use the existing capacity as smartly as we could. We looked at what we needed for the Royal Adelaide Hospital and the advice was that it is not big enough and, besides that, the services there are run down, the buildings are run-down, and we—

Mr Williams interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The member for MacKillop is warned a second time.

The Hon. J.D. HILL: I will resist from commenting on the interjections but I want to make this point: if the opposition wants to make a point of any of the interjections they make, I would invite them to ask me a question and I will respond formally to them because I am more than happy to answer any of their questions. I can do it all through question time if they would like. The point I was making was that we did a rational review of what we need for our health system in our state and the advice to government, the advice to me, which I took to—

Dr McFetridge interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Morphett is warned.

The Hon. J.D. HILL: The advice to me, which I took to government, which was checked by cabinet and checked by Treasury, was that the most rational and sensible thing to get the extra capacity for the best use of our money was to build a hospital on the new site. I have to say, as I have said frequently before, it came as something of a shock to me to receive that advice, but when I went through it and when I thought about it, when I was able to present it to my colleagues, we all came to the conclusion that it was the right advice. It came from experts who understand these things.

It was not a political idea: it was an idea that came out of the health system. They said the smartest thing you can do is to build the hospital on a new site because it gives you room for expansion, you can get a modern hospital which will be efficient, make savings, and it will be bigger and it will fix up all of the infrastructure problems that are existing at the RAH. Besides that, you will have it available for the public by 2016. To do it on the existing site would mean we would not get the expansion that we need; it would mean it would take longer (through to about 2025, if we were to start it next year) and it would cost more money. So, when you look at this rationally, you come to the only conclusion that everybody else who has looked at this rationally has reached. I invite the opposition to stop being political about this and start thinking through what is in the best interests of the public of South Australia.

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