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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
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SUPPLY BILL 2012

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading (resumed on motion).

Mr WHETSTONE (Chaffey) (17:11): Resuming my support for this bill, reluctantly, I come back to food production and regional issues. Before I move on to one of the Premier's seven priorities I would like to touch on the water issue. One of the big issues has been the desalination plant and the outrageous decision by this government to increase the capacity of the desal plant from 50 gigalitres to 100 gigalitres. I wonder whether this government has done any research into or looked at aquifer storage? It has spent over $200 million putting a pipeline from the south to the north—interrupted traffic, interrupted people's lives, interrupted people's businesses—yet how much aquifer storage has been looked at?

Look at the water saving incentives. It seems, now that the drought is over, that the government has wiped its hands of any water saving incentives and just walked away, and I think that is quite irresponsible. Look at roads, particularly rural roads. Today we heard the minister responsible for small business and mining talk about the Mindarie mines in the Mallee (quite close to Loxton) and how the mining sector will have to pick up the tab on repairing the roads. I think the argument will be that the roads were in a state of disrepair before the mine even got underway for the second time, so for the minister to come out and say that the mines are going to pick up the tab on road maintenance, repairing the roads and getting those roads back into a credible state is something that the minister needs to look at again.

Rural roads, in particular, take produce—not only horticulture and viticulture—to the markets and ports. We need to look at what that is doing to the quality of produce, particularly the soft fruits. There have been a number of incidents where produce has got to the market or the port in a very poor state and that has been due to the condition of the roads with their undulating surfaces and it really is a poor indictment of what our regional roads are doing to our produce.

Again, this highlights one of the Premier's seven priorities which he is clearly not focusing on. The carbon tax that he supports is going to increase the cost of food production. Look at the Premier's outrageous calls for 4,000 gigalitres through the Murray-Darling Basin Authority's plan. What impact is that going to have on food production here in South Australia? I wonder if the Premier has thought about that? I would say no because he is being so political about this. He has been so consumed by the environment sector, photo opportunities and political spin that he is so renowned for now, having only been in the job for a very short amount of time, that he has no understanding of what this is going to mean to the cost of living.

The cost of living is going to be the big ticket at this coming election and he is prepared to support a substantial increase in the cost of food, the cost of growing food, the cost of getting food to market and the cost of getting food into the export markets. Again, I think that the Premier's seven priorities—particularly the one-off with food production—are more political spin. We saw the Premier come out today, looking at hollow words on GST impacts. He needs to concentrate on his own backyard. Pointing his finger at the commonwealth government is clearly showing that he has not got his finger on the pulse here in South Australia. He is continuing to increase debt, continuing to increase uncertainty, and continuing to increase the concerns of the food growing sector.

Mr Deputy Speaker, this government, which, unfortunately, you are a part of, clearly does not have its finger on the pulse with food production, and with the reliance upon food that South Australian people deserve. I think that that priority is something that this government needs to look at hard and fast. I think that supporting a carbon tax, particularly, is going to put another nail into the coffin of food producers.

Mrs REDMOND (Heysen—Leader of the Opposition) (17:16): It is my pleasure to rise to make a contribution in relation to the Supply Bill. May I say at the outset that I always find it a little bemusing that we do the Supply Bill every year, because if the government was actually organised, it seems to me that we could deal with the budget in time for 30 June, and not need a supply bill, so that we could continue to pay for public servants once we get past 30 June. That said, the very thing that this government specialises in is delaying the bad news, and it is indeed bad news after 10 years of Labor in this state.

What we have in this state at the moment, of course, is a Labor government that has taken us from bad to worse in terms of the economic performance of this state, and over the 10 years, people forget that in the first seven years, they had the best economic times that this state has ever seen. We had money coming into this state that you would not believe. We had a property boom. The amount of stamp duty and other property taxes coming in were enormous compared to previous years and, furthermore, on top of that, we had the untold riches of GST revenue coming in. Indeed, the Auditor-General warned the government some years ago that, and I quote:

The State may have developed a culture of expecting growing revenues to continue to support increasing expenses.

That is exactly what this government did for all those years. Every year, year upon year, for the first seven years, they got about $500 million—about half a billion dollars—every year, over and above the money that they should have expected, and the money that they had budgeted to receive in their own budget papers. Now you would think that if you had received half a billion dollars—$500 million extra each year—even if you got it for one year, you would be pretty happy. But if you had got it year upon year, you would think that you would have been able to put a little bit of it aside.

You would think that. You would think that a government would be able to stick to its budget—you might have some small overruns, you might eat into your $500 million a bit—but this government not only spent the whole lot, but they got us a debt on top of that. They dug a hole in spite of having $500 million a year extra above their budget estimates coming in, and the result is that we now have a debt of about $8 billion in this state.

People have trouble conceiving what that debt means to the state; $8 billion is so much money that the ordinary person in the street cannot understand it. However, when I explain to them that the cost of that is an interest bill, everyone understands that on their mortgage they pay interest on the amount that they have borrowed; they understand that there is an interest bill on a loan and a debt; and they understand when I explain to them that the interest bill already on the $8 billion debt we have in this state is about $2 million a day, each and every day.

I invite them to think about just what this state would look like if, instead of the payment of that $2 million each and every day, year upon year while we have this debt, we were able to spend $2 million on all different things around this state. If everyday we could say, 'Here, Mount Gambier, have $2 million. Here, Port Pirie, have $2 million. Here, Marion, have $2 million. Here, Elizabeth, have $2 million.' On and on and on, $2 million, day upon day upon day. The story gets worse not better. Not only do we have $2 million a day in debt at the moment, but this government—and when he first became Treasurer, he famously said, 'We don't want to run up a credit card debt. We don't want to put things on the never-never. We don't want to run up a credit card debt but we are proceeding with a new hospital.'

So, in addition to the $2 million a day for the interest bill on the debt we should not have, when that hospital is completed in 2016, guess what, we are going to have to start to pay for that on the never-never. That will add another $1.1 million a day, each and every day, from then until 30 years later. The person who is 16 years old at the moment will have that bill hanging over their head for all of that time. When you total up all the state debt and add in the unfunded liability of WorkCover—and I will come back to that in a moment—we will very shortly have a total liability of $23 billion. When you think that $8 billion is costing us $2 million a day, you can imagine what the effect of a $23 billion debt might be.

I mentioned WorkCover a moment ago. When we left office in 2002, we got the unfunded liability of WorkCover down. They had it out at about a billion dollars, but we dragged it back down. We got it down to about $56 million or $59 million. This government has so far managed to turn that around so that we are now back once again with more than a billion dollars in unfunded liability for WorkCover.

You might not even mind that so much if you had a good operating WorkCover system, but the reality is that we have the worst operating system in the country. We have a system that has the worst return-to-work rate of any system in the country and amongst the highest levies. We know that it is the way the government has managed this that is the problem. If you look at the people who are called exempts—they are operating under the same legislation but they are big enough companies not to have to go through WorkCover—they operate the same system under the same legislation, and they are doing fine. Their levies are often only about a third of the average levy in the businesses that are under the WorkCover system.

This government has no idea how to manage anything. As I said, they were warned by the Auditor-General for years and years. What is more, they keep painting these fanciful pictures of the future. They keep saying to us all sorts of things. They said three years ago, in 2008-09, that what we are going to have in 2011-12 is a budget surplus of $424 million. Then came the Mid-Year Budget Review and they had reduced it a bit, then the next budget it reduced a bit further, then a bit further at the next Mid-Year Budget Review, and on and on it went.

In three short years they have turned it from an expectation of a $424 million surplus to a $367 million deficit. That is an $800 million reversal of our fortunes in this state thanks to the mismanagement of this government, who crowed about having a AAA credit rating. They got that only because of the hard work done by the previous Liberal government. As Matt and Dave said on 891 the other day, it was probably a good thing that we had the worst treasurer in history at a time when we had probably the best income in history, because his problems did not show up until after he departed. This government is a disgrace in the way they have dealt with the fortunes of this state. As the Auditor-General said, they have relied on incomes that they had no right to continue to expect.

I have been talking to a lot of people in the real estate sector. Anyone can tell that in the real estate sector we are having a great deal of difficulty. Many people who work in that sector are complaining. Many more are now out of work because the real estate sector is doing it so tough. How tough is the real estate sector doing it? It is doing it so tough that the government has had to revise downwards the amount it expects to get by way of stamp duty. Stamp duty in this state is particularly high, and the real estate sector is going to be putting into the government coffers, on the government's best expectations, $274 million less stamp duty than what they expected a year ago.

My eldest son recently bought a house with his wife. They bought at about the average price and paid about the average stamp duty of $14,000. In terms of the number of transactions, that means that on an average price with an average stamp duty of $14,000, that $274 million equates to no less than 19,571 transactions. Is it any wonder we are in a bad way in this state?

You then look at things like land tax. I have been getting complaints about land tax from all sorts of people. The previous treasurer's attitude was that land tax is just a problem for the rich, because only people who are rich can have extra properties, who then have to pay land tax. The problem with that way of thinking is, firstly, that it fails to recognise that virtually every business in this state—because it is nearly all small to medium enterprises—operate out of rental premises. That means that somewhere there is a landlord who has to pay land tax and, guess what? That land tax comes home to roost eventually in the price that that landlord is going to charge for rent. So, there is the first problem.

The second problem is that there are a lot of hard working people, particularly in migrant communities, in fact, who, rather than going into other forms of superannuation, try to provide for themselves, try to make themselves independent for the future. How do they do that? By not only buying their house but then by buying some other property so that they have got that security into their retirement and they have got a mechanism by which they can fund their own retirement.

This government failed to recognise that and made the land tax regime so oppressive. They have increased it by something like 374 per cent over 10 years they have been in office. They made it so oppressive that people are now leaving this state in droves and taking their investment with them. Indeed, I had someone come into my office just a few months ago. This chap was about my age. He had spent his entire working life, virtually, building up a property portfolio, and that property portfolio was what he generated his income from and, again, he expected to fund his retirement using that property portfolio. But, the land tax regime on his total $15 million property portfolio had become so oppressive that he decided to leave the state and take his entire investment portfolio to another state.

Why did he do that? Because, he said to me, 'I have to use the first six months of rent just pay land tax; just to pay the land tax, six months of rent. I still on top of that then have to pay the council rates. On top of that I have to pay the insurance and the maintenance.' He said, 'I'm lucky if I make one or two weeks rental out of each rental property for an entire year's rental. That is the only profit that comes to me. It is simply not worth the bother of holding property in this state.'

Indeed, our previous treasurer on his disclosure return to this parliament showed that his investment was not in this state at all; it was in Sydney. There is a smart idea: let's not invest in this state even if you are the treasurer of the state. The reason why? I do not know what his personal reasons were but I have a suspicion that he was not damaged nearly as much by the land tax regime in other states as he would be if he had made the same investment in this state.

The government of this state has led us down a dreadful path in terms of where we are going to get to economically. Indeed, I mentioned a little earlier the fact that we now have a net operating deficit of $367 million in 2011-12. The fact is that that is the kindest interpretation. There are actually three different measures upon which you can measure deficits. There is the net operating deficit, which is $367 million, or you can look at the cash deficit. The cash deficit is $1,445 million for this year. The net lending deficit is $1,519 million for 2011-12. So, we are going from bad to worse under this government.

Can I mention some more things about our tax regime? Not only is stamp duty an horrific tax and land tax absolutely pushing investment out of this state, but look at things like payroll tax. I have had a number of business owners come to me and say, 'I will not put on more staff. I'd like to grow my business, but I am not going to put on more staff because the cost of that will be too much. It will push me over the threshold for paying payroll tax in this state, and that will mean that I then have to pay so much that it becomes uneconomical for me to put on extra staff.'

When you compare our threshold, which is about $600,000, with places like Queensland, where the threshold is more like $1 million, you can understand that Queensland is doing a lot more to make it a viable place for businesses to operate than this state is. The reality is that we have in this state the highest tax regime of any state in Australia and we are the state that can least afford to have that. We are the state that actually needs more people, more businesses.

This government for years and years has relied on this promise, the promised land of a wondrous future in the mining industry. They have ignored everything else: they have ignored small business. It does not matter about small business. They do not understand that successful government means we have got to have successful small business in this state.

It is the backbone of our economy, but instead of understanding that they go out and spend money that they have not got and rely on this promised land of the mining sector that is going to produce all these riches. Well, let me tell you, Madam Speaker, that last year we made about $200 million in this state from mining royalties—$200 million. Compare that with Western Australia where, from mining royalties in the current year, it is expecting to make closer to $5 billion—or $5,000 million—in mining royalties; or Queensland, where it is getting up close to $2 billion in mining royalties.

Our $200 million is paltry, but for 10 years this government has been talking about a mining boom that is yet to happen and we have been led down the garden path by a government promising things that it cannot deliver. Not only do we have the highest taxes of any state, we have got the nation's worst economic growth over the last 12 months. We have the highest capital city water charges, and, of course, we have the wondrous situation where the one thing where we are getting a bullet to the top is our electricity prices.

We know that we already have the third most expensive electricity in the world, the third highest electricity prices in the world, and that is without adding on the carbon tax. By the time we add on the carbon tax we are going to No. 1 with a bullet. We are going to have the highest cost of electricity of anywhere in the world and the highest capital city water charges. This government just does not seem to get that the cost of living is doing nothing but go up and up and up at a rate much faster than any increase in wages. Indeed, we have got some of the lowest wage increases. We have the slowest growth in wages but the fastest growth in consumer prices of the whole country.

We had the worst jobs growth in 20 years. Do you remember that before the election the previous premier, Mike Rann, promised an extra 100,000 jobs. Strangely, not only have they not materialised but we have fewer people in full-time employment in this state than when the former premier made that promise; and, what is more, had we just kept up with the national average in terms of jobs growth we would currently have 41,000 more jobs in the system than we have. This is a disgrace and this is going to kill this state.

We desperately need a change of government in this state. Sadly, I have always favoured fixed four-year terms. I have always thought that was one good thing in our system. In fact, it was one of the first conversations I had with a previous premier, John Olsen. I thought that we should have fixed four-year terms. The problem with them, of course, is that when you get a bad government you can get a lot of damage done to the state in four years, and that is exactly what they are doing.

We have got the nation's worst business confidence and we have got the nation's worst retail sales figures. I have already mentioned the nation's worst performing workers compensation figures. We have got the nation's worst housing finance commitments, we have got the nation's worst jobs growth and the worst monthly building approvals figures in the last 130 months—that is more than 11 years. We have got the nation's worst—the worst property sales figures in 27 years and the lowest quarterly dwelling commencements in 10 years, yet this government seems to decide that, in spite of all that, we can still go out and spend money where it does not belong.

I am still personally really angry about the fact that they cannot find $300,000 to keep the public patients' component of the Keith hospital going. It has the cheapest occupied bed days of any hospital you could get, but they will not spend $300,000 on that, yet they are prepared to spend $200,000 giving Mike Rann a golden handshake when he leaves this place. That is an utter disgrace and you should all hang your heads in shame over that. Any idea that it was only $100,000, as bleated by the Premier, is just a nonsense. It was definitely $200,000 because your government's own document from the Sustainable Budget Commission made it clear that a car with a driver cost $300,000 per annum.

If that cost $300,000 per annum then just supplying the car with a driver for six months makes it $150,000; and on top of that he was to get an office, a secretary and all sorts of other benefits—a phone, I believe—and all sorts of things, yet for six months he gets that. He could have stayed as the member for Ramsay if he had so much work to do when he stopped being the premier—he already had staff supplied—instead of costing us a by-election, but that is them.

Then, today, we have got the announcement about the mere $1.7 million that they have spent on getting consultants to help them sort out the mess they created in installing a new computer system. I said in a press conference just after question time I consider all computer salesmen to be snake oil salesmen, and I will never resile from that comment. They always promise what they cannot deliver: they always mess up.

What we should have done was go at it piecemeal, not decide they are going to be let loose to go in and destroy perfectly operating systems. Combine the Oracle system with the so-called benefits of shared services. I am yet to meet a public servant who thinks that shared services has been anything other than a dismal disaster for this government and something that frustrates public servants no end.

Madam Speaker, with those few comments I will draw to a close. Suffice to say that I am unimpressed by the economic mismanagement of this state by an incompetent and self-interested government that has done nothing for the people of this state and everything towards its own ends.

Ms SANDERSON (Adelaide) (17:35): I rise to make a contribution regarding the Supply Bill. As we have just heard from our leader, the government for the last 10 years has been getting an extra $500 million worth of GST money that was never budgeted for. They say, 'It's not what you earn, it's what you spend.' Instead of putting away that money and reducing state taxes and building for the future, they have actually spent every cent, and more, and left us in debt. During the best economic times when we could have put away money for a rainy day, they have spent every single cent of it.

There are a few topics in my electorate that are particularly important to me. One is Adelaide Oval, which is another example of bad policy and bad financial management. On the back of a very popular sports stadium, a covered stadium, that the Liberals put up, the Labor Party patched together a bit of an idea of increasing the size of Adelaide Oval at a cost of not a penny more than $450 million. Of course, it was not long before the $85 million SACA debt was included in the figure, bringing that to $535 million, and it was not long again before the bridge that was originally included in the figure became a separate figure of $40 million, when a very similar bridge was built in Victoria for $17 million.

I think when property developers or engineers see the state government of South Australia coming they just double the price, because we seem to have no idea. It is a sad indictment on the state for 12,000 extra seats. Mind you, the Crows and Port Power, I do not believe, have ever got 50,000 to a game. I doubt they have even got 38,000, which is the capacity of Adelaide Oval, anyway.

An honourable member interjecting:

Ms SANDERSON: Not very often, and certainly for the amount it will cost. We could have actually brought football to Adelaide Oval without expanding it and then built up the crowd capacity and paid for it out of the money from ticket sales rather than taking it out of government funds and not funding things like the Keith hospital.

It is a ridiculous thing to pull down the Bradman Stand (that was only built in 1990) and the Chappell Stand (only built in 2003) and, even worse, when the furniture inside those buildings is seen on the nightly news falling out of the building when, as we know, there are plenty of people in need who could have used that furniture—even if it was given away but, even better, if it could have been sold. We also know that Adelaide United was very keen to have the sails for their use and they were not reused, either. It is just another example of the absolute waste by this government.

That is not to mention that we are destroying what was the most iconic and beautiful Adelaide Oval without providing adequate parking, so now we are going to have people parking on the parklands and throughout North Adelaide causing traffic jams. This is all for 12,000 seats and no roof; and, even after building the $95 million stand only one or two years ago, we now have to add to that the media unit, extra toilets and a bar; and we know from experience that the rain cover will only cover about the back five rows so it is not even weather-resistant, as it supposedly was. It is an example of the absolute waste by this government.

The bridge concerns me greatly because now we are hearing, in order to use the bridge on approximately, I believe, the 24 days a year that there would be football played there, they have to close off Memorial Drive. So, for the rest of the year if you have walked across that bridge, you have to walk down to the lights to cross over anyway, so why don't we just walk down King William Street? Why would you pay $40 million and have a bridge used 24 times a year that really will not be of any use for the rest of the year because you will have to walk down to King William Street to cross at the lights because they cannot close off the road for the whole year?

Another example of ridiculous, last-minute policy is Adelaide High School. Only about six days before the March election in a last-ditch effort to try to get votes in Prospect and Walkerville, the state government came out with a plan that would expand Adelaide High School to allow for an extra 250 spaces, not encroach on the Parklands and expand the zone to include Prospect and Walkerville.

Two years on, what have we got? Last week the City Council approved, at a 6:5 vote, encroachment on the Parklands, so the building that will be built is on the Parklands and against their initial policy. It will cost $17 million and, at this stage, there has been no declaration of any expansion of the zone into Prospect or Walkerville. As to the 250 spaces and whether they actually mean a building fit for 450, as Adelaide High School is already 200 over capacity, I have asked questions in estimates and the governing council (of which I am a member) has written to the previous minister for education and now the current Minister for Education asking the exact number. Are we really getting a building for 250? We are 200 over so that means there are only 50 extra spaces which means we will not be expanding the zone at all into Prospect or Walkerville, so why are we spending $17 million for a bandaid solution that in one year will be over capacity again? Why would you waste that money? It is just another example of why I cannot sleep at night thinking about the devastating financial situation that this Labor government is leaving us.

As far as business goes, after 17½ years in business and currently still being a business owner, I can tell you it has been the worst two years in my business life under this government, and there are many reasons for that. When doorknocking my electorate, I hear that many people are experiencing the same thing. Our leader was just talking about examples of people taking their money out of our state. I have doorknocked business owners who have housing construction businesses that will still be doing building and construction in our state but, as far as all their administration and office staff, they will move to Queensland or elsewhere interstate where the payroll taxes are lower, the land taxes are lower and where they have a government that is supportive of small business.

At the moment, as an example, as graduate accountants coming out of university we had training where all of the new graduates from around the country came together and we discussed what we were earning. At the time—and this was about 1991—accountants were paid under the clerk's award, so it was $22,000 in our first year out, and that was for South Australia. It was about $24,000 in Victoria, $26,000 in New South Wales, $27,000 in the ACT, and pretty well the wages were dependent on the cost of living in all of those states.

Julia Gillard in all of her wisdom has brought in a national wage system which means now that everyone gets paid at the highest rate. If you are a South Australian graduate, you will now get $27,000 because you have to be in line with the rest of the country. We only have 1.6 million in population, so the potential turnover is a lot lower. The charge out rates are a lot lower, the payroll taxes are higher, the land taxes are higher and now we even have two new half-day public holidays courtesy of the SDA union. How difficult can you make being in business in this state?

Mr Goldsworthy: They run the state.

Ms SANDERSON: Who is running this state? Yes, exactly. We are now officially the laziest state in Australia because now we have 11 plus two part-day public holidays. New South Wales are the only state with 12 public holidays and we know what a financial mess they are in, so the Liberals will have a lot of mess to clean up there. The last thing we needed was more public holidays and higher rates when businesses, as we know, particularly in retail and hospitality, are absolutely struggling. The number of letters that I have received from business owners who own restaurants or cafes—who have started cafes that have even gone out of business.

Look at Melbourne Street, Prospect Road, O'Connell Street and you will find empty shops all along there. For someone to make a coffee on a Sunday it is over $30 an hour, so the only cafes that open are extremely busy and popular or they have their family working or the business owner has to do all the hours. They are working 80 hour weeks because they cannot afford to have any staff in; the union is so strong that it has outpriced the ability for businesses to actually stay open.

What kind of state do we live in when taxi drivers are earning $8 an hour and a 16 year old stacking shelves in Coles on a Sunday is earning $30 an hour? That just goes to show how strong the SDA union is, how out of touch it is with this society, and why it will be the death of this state if we do not bring back the balance of power.

Business owners are not all rich people living off the backs of their young workers that people might think they are; most business owners in this state are very hard working, working 60 to 70 hours. Again, go to cafes along Prospect Road and you will see the owners looking exhausted because they have just worked a 70 hour week; they cannot afford to employ staff at the rates we have. Included with that are all the government taxes, the payroll taxes and everything that goes together with that. We have to start encouraging business to this state. We are absolutely destroying our state.

In the eighties, when I was looking back through the financial records of businesses—I was an auditor in an accounting firm—we were booming here. We used to have some of the top 100 companies. We had John Martin's, we had Faulding's head office here, Harris Scarfe used to have all its buying department and advertising here, we had Young and Rubicam. We have lost many big businesses out of our state.

We say that we put money into Holden because of all the other businesses it supports; well, every two weeks John Martin's would have a catalogue and that would be thousands and thousands of catalogues printed. So that is printers who lost money, advertising agencies that lost money, models who lost money, art directors, make-up artists, hairstylists, photographers. There are thousands of people affected by every business that shuts down; Holden is not the only business that passes on work to other industries.

We need to start supporting small businesses in our state, because they will have a knock-on effect. We are losing too many of our young, valuable people out of the state because we do not have the job opportunities, and the job opportunities come from small businesses that grow into medium-sized businesses and then into bigger businesses. If they cannot even survive being a small business because of this oppressive tax regime and the red tape, and because of just how difficult things are in this state, we are never going to get any better and we will not ever entice young people to stay.

What kind of a government sells all its income-producing assets? How will we ever get ahead? We are in massive debt, and the last thing you would do is sell the only things that make you money when you are in debt. Why would you sell your Lotteries Commission, which brings in millions of dollars a year? Why would you sell your forests? Why would you sell your hospital car parks? Everyone I know who has any investing capacity says that investing in a car park is a ticket to write your own money, and now we have the government wanting to sell all the hospital car parks.

There will be nothing left to sell and you will have no income-producing assets, and the only way you will be able to make money is by taxing people—and you know how much people love being taxed. If you actually kept assets that earn money, and if you had learnt to live off the GST, you could by now have got rid of most of the state taxes—which is, in fact, what most South Australians thought was going to happen.

There are a lot of issues with this government, and I just hope that it does not put us into any more debt or commit us to any more really bad contracts. The Royal Adelaide Hospital would be one of them. First of all it was going to be the Marjorie Jackson hospital, until the government finally listened to the public and saw how unpopular that idea was. But to move it to not only a flight path but to one of the major intersections in our city—the intersection of Port Road, West Terrace and North Terrace—could you make it any more difficult for people to get to? We do not have a train stop there yet; maybe we will, that would make a lot of sense.

Where the hospital is now it could have been rebuilt on its existing site for about $2 billion less than the government is paying. In every other country in the world they somehow manage to keep buildings over 100 years old and build next to small sites. If you have ever been to Hong Kong, they could have built extra buildings even in the alleyways between two buildings. It is ridiculous how difficult things are in Adelaide. Why do we need to waste prime land on a riverbank and turn it into a hospital, of all things, which has fewer facilities than the original hospital. We are not even getting something better. We are getting something less, that we cannot even get to, that we will be paying off for 30 years. It is a monolith. It is disgraceful and such a waste of money.

That leads me to the BER money, which I know was a federal source of money, but it is an example of how Labor governments work. All this money has been given to schools to build school halls. The North Adelaide Basketball Club has about 53 basketball teams and they are operating out of two very old courts in Hillcrest. At one point, due to water damage, they only had one court. I rang Basketball SA when I saw that in the paper and said, 'What about all the BER money? Surely you could have built at the Roma Mitchell School,' which is actually built on the minister for sport's land. Why would you not put on sports land a four-court basketball facility? It is right opposite the hockey and the velodrome, and it is on the minister for sport's land. Why wouldn't you put four courts there? They said, 'We did ask for four courts there, but we only have two.' I said, 'Well, what about all the other school halls that were built? Why can't we use those for basketball?' They said, 'Because most of them were built at 75 per cent of the size, so now we cannot use them.'

For example, St Andrews School is right across from Walkerville Primary School and the Walkerville YMCA, which is very old and run down; why wouldn't you have put the money from the three school halls together and built a sports stadium for the whole community? Why would Norwood Primary School have its third school hall at the one primary school when it did not need it? Clearly, the money could have been used for better purposes. It is just another example of Labor mismanagement of money.

As for the cost of living, I do Meals on Wheels in my electorate and I meet a lot of elderly people who are living in their family home, where they were born. They are now 80 and 90 and now they cannot afford to live there because everything is rated on the cost of your home. Just because you live in an area where the housing has appreciated does not mean that you are earning any more money. Most of them are actually on the pension and that is why they are getting Meals on Wheels at $6 a day or whatever it is.

They have lovely homes and council rates are based on the value of the home, as are water rates, the emergency services levy and the River Murray levy. We are pushing people out of their own homes. It is an absolute disgrace. Just because you were wise and bought an asset that improved in value does not mean that you are rich and should be punished and that we should take you away from your home.

I recently had a constituent who sold her home for $500,000 less than the Valuer-General's value, so for the last 10 years she has been paying rates, water rates, ES levies and River Murray levies on $500,000 more than the value for which she could sell her home. It is an absolute rip-off, and everyone is putting everything up all the time.

Now let us talk about Rundle Mall. Rundle Mall certainly needs some investment. Why would you put more shops on the riverbank when we cannot even fill the shops we already have in Rundle Mall? Let's fix what we already have. I think there are 110,000 city workers who come in and out of the city, and a lot of them work in Rundle Mall or nearby. I know that Rundle Mall Management Authority is doing its very best to encourage people into the mall, and hopefully we will not be seeing the potential price increases of the car parks.

I have certainly had a lot of complaints about the state government's doubling of parking fines throughout the whole state. The City Council has been taking the wrath, because they are the ones who actually issue the fines although it was a state government initiative. It is just another example of penny-pinching because it has so many bad policies that are costing a lot of money—including the desal plant. The pipeline is going right through Walkerville Terrace and hugely affecting retailers there. They are absolutely struggling with their road being closed for so long.

It has definitely gone over time. That was $403 million that we actually did not need. The only reason we needed the $403 million north-south interconnector was because the state government doubled the size of the desal plant. As mentioned, that was not on the basis of any information. That was just to double the Liberals' policy rather than having the Liberal policy of a 50-gigalitre desal along with stormwater harvesting, aquifers and storage of the water. Potentially, we are about to be funnelling the most expensive water we have ever had out to sea because we have nowhere to store it. Given that the Murray River is running and it is raining, it is going to be the most expensive waste of money.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. P. Caica.

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