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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2011-07-27 Daily Xml
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RURAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart) (15:27): I would like to speak today on a theme on which I hope to expand a bit over the next few years, to be perfectly blunt; that is, the undervaluing of country and outback institutions and infrastructure when they are valued only by economic means in judging their primary purpose for being. I will give a few examples in the short amount of time I have today, looking at roads, schools and hospitals.

If you value the road purely by the traffic it carries, you completely undervalue the importance of that piece of infrastructure to the state. It is the same with schools. If you value a school purely by the number of its students and the results they receive—although of course that is exceptionally important—you undervalue that school and its importance. It is also the same with hospitals: if you look purely at patients and at health outcomes, as important as they are, then you undervalue that hospital to the state and the country area it is in.

I would like to say that I understand economics very well and I think I understand, as well as anyone in this place, how important it is to place an economic value on things and to understand exactly what economic value these institutions and this infrastructure offer. However, my point is that is not the only value. You cannot do without that first value, but you cannot avoid the importance of the other values.

Following the example of roads, if you look at an outback road, for example, and look at the distance it covers from point A to point B, the amount of users, the amount of traffic on it, and you say, 'That's the use that this road is getting', then you completely undervalue that road. In the case of the Birdsville Track, for example, to consider it to stop at the northern South Australian boundary would be a great mistake. That road needs to be upgraded and needs to be used to encourage Queensland beef producers to use it to send their Queensland beef to our South Australian markets, because there is a 7:1 multiplier. For every dollar received at a cattle market there is a 7:1 multiplier in terms of other economic benefit to the state, so if we can get Queensland cattle coming to our South Australian market instead of being sent east into Queensland markets then there is enormous benefit to our state which is not measured purely by the number of cattle stations on the Birdsville Track or the number of trucks that currently use the road.

When you look at schools, primarily, you look at the number of students, the quality of their education and the results they are receiving, and you try to improve on that. However, the value of a country school to a country town is far more than that. If a school closes people stop bringing their children into that town every day from the surrounding district, and if they stop doing that then they stop shopping in that town, so shortly after the school closes the small general store closes, then the service station closes, and on and on. The value of that school is actually far greater to the local economy than could possibly be judged solely on educational outcomes.

Looking at hospitals in country areas, the same parallel exists. Clearly, health outcomes are of primary importance when it comes to a hospital and of primary importance when it comes to funding decisions, but they are certainly not the only considerations that should be brought to bear. Country hospitals in regional South Australia typically employ anywhere between 30 and 60 people. These jobs are all exceptionally important and I am not saying that we should embark upon some Keynesian economic model and just put hospitals there to create jobs—far from it—but when the decision about valuing hospitals and whether or not they should be retained is made, considering all of those jobs in the district is an exceptionally important part of that decision.

The value that those hospitals give to the community is far greater than just the number of patients in those beds, the percentage of bed occupancy and the level of care that is required for patients. Those jobs are exceptionally important and there is a multiplier that flows all the way through the economy and, of course, not only in the town where the hospital exists. If a person in a position of decision-making authority is to look at a hospital and say, 'There's one close by so we can go without it,' they are undervaluing that hospital.

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