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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2010-05-06 Daily Xml
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GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY

Dr McFETRIDGE (Morphett) (17:33): Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and congratulations on your appointment to that position. I will do this more formally in my address in reply speech and congratulate the member for Giles on her elevation to the position of Speaker. I have had a long association with the member for Giles through the Aboriginal Lands parliamentary standing committee. I know that she is a woman of integrity and passion, and I look forward to seeing her in that position for a long time to come.

As we all know, the result of the 2010 election was that we are on this side and the Labor Party is still in government. We can argue about the outcome of the result, but the bottom line is that, as the shadow minister and being part of Her Majesty's loyal opposition, I will be doing my utmost to show that the portfolios for which I have been given responsibility this term are examined very closely. The minister who is in charge of those various portfolios will be put under a lot of pressure, and I can guarantee that will happen from day one.

I am continuing with the health and mental health portfolios this time around. I also have substance abuse and have picked up the very important, but sometimes overlooked, portfolio of veterans' affairs. I have relinquished my real passion of Aboriginal affairs for one reason only, and that is because Aboriginal affairs takes up a lot of time and needs a lot of input from a lot of areas all over the state. With the other responsibilities of health, mental health and substance abuse (many of which overlap into Aboriginal affairs), I have made the decision, after consulting the Leader of the Opposition, to give the portfolio to the Hon. Terry Stephens in the upper house, who I know will do a very good job in that area. He and I will work very closely to ensure the issues surrounding Aboriginal affairs continue to be advanced as they should in this parliament.

The health portfolio has been described to me as everything from a basket case to an absolutely abysmal mess, and that is after eight years of Labor government. We have just seen a series of CEOs and senior health bureaucrats resign, and we will ask questions about why that has happened. It is a serious issue when you have top executives with many years of experience packing their bags and going. We want to know why, and what is going on in health. We have just seen the amalgamation of the Central Northern Adelaide Health Service with the Southern Adelaide Health Service to create one monolith, and it looks as though we will have two regions in South Australia—the Adelaide metropolitan region and also the country region. If the rumours I am hearing are right, that we will then have only two local hospital networks, a city network and a country network, they are not much in the way of networks.

This goes completely against what the Prime Minister was trying to achieve and, should I say, what the Liberal Party would have done had we been elected, that is, local governance of local hospitals. Local boards is something we would have had. The federal government is looking for local management and local input, but you cannot tell me that what I am hearing about two local hospital networks, out of a total of 150 but brought back to 90 nationally, will be good for South Australia. It is not good to have remote bureaucrats dictating to hospitals their outcomes and the way things should be managed. The Prime Minister says this in his local hospital network report.

What is happening in health in South Australia has to be re-examined and changed. We cannot continue to do things the same way. Today we had the minister standing here talking about the four hour maximum wait for patients in emergency departments. I really wish him luck, because the people of South Australia deserve that—they deserve even better—but the overseas and Western Australian experiences show that is an almost impossible task unless you put massive resources into the staffing and emergency departments and, also, further down the chain. You have to make sure there are beds available and there are facilities to examine people and diagnose and treat their ailments, and, if they do not need to be admitted to an acute bed (if there is one available) they can be discharged to an appropriate facility or, better still, go home. That has to be able to happen but it is not happening at the moment. We have seen massive increases in the waiting lists and waiting times in our public hospitals. We have heard the Premier and the minister today again say that we have thousands of extra nurses and doctors. That may be the case, but we are not seeing the benefits that we should see. We hope to see that in the next four years.

Time expired.

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