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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-06-13 Daily Xml
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APPROPRIATION BILL 2012

Adjourned debate on motion to note grievances (resumed on motion).

Dr McFETRIDGE (Morphett) (17:02): During question time, the Minister for Transport made a remark about voters who will be voting in 2014 not having been born when the State Bank collapsed in 1992. We just heard from the member for Davenport that the 'bad bank' (I think they call it), the South Australian asset management group, has just been wound up in this budget, some 20 years later. So, the State Bank is still with us; the Minister for Transport should know that. It has been holding this state back for nearly 20 years now.

What we are seeing is this state being the subject of the State Bank mark 2. We are seeing an absolutely record debt of $13 billion. We are seeing a hospital that is coming online in 2015-16 (I think it is coming into the budget), which will add another $1.1 million a day, assuming that interest rates stay low. If the base interest rate increases, I understand that we could be paying up to $1.5 million a day for the hospital, and that is just the lease payments, and then we pay all the nonclinical contract add-ons as well, plus staffing, new equipment, and that sort of thing, for the hospital.

It will be a massive weight around the neck of my children, my grandchildren, and probably my great-grandchildren, if they stay in this state, and I hope they do because it is a fabulous state to live in. As it did in the eighties and nineties, this Labor government has driven the state into the ground financially. What we are seeing here is a government which raises expectations and fails to deliver on its promises. The only thing we have seen—and it has a track history of this—is driving us into the ground with debt.

I just hope that in 2014 the people of South Australia give the Liberal Party the opportunity to try to correct what has been undone by this government. We have lost our AAA credit rating again. The Liberal government in the nineties did its very best to get things back on track again. Certainly, there were some changes and issues around the sale of state assets that had to be managed because there was no other way that we were going to reduce that debt. The Auditor-General has acknowledged that and the fact that we got the AAA credit rating back partly because of the actions of the Liberal government.

What we are seeing now, though, is a record debt, a $13 billion debt. I think just the interest on the current debt is about $2.4 million a day; when you add on the hospital, we are paying about $3.5 million to $4 million a day—not to the Belgian dentists, as we did back then, but to some other group of financiers, probably overseas, who are laughing all the way to the bank with what this government is doing.

The big problem for the Liberal Party, should we get into government, will be the state of the state, and that is why the opposition has announced the audit commission. It will be interesting to see what the Queensland audit commission comes out with on Friday. I will be very interested to see the state of the books in South Australia if we are able to get our hands on the Treasury bench and implement an audit commission here, because I bet it is not all sweetness and light. I think some serious issues will come to light again. There will be claims about black holes, there will be claims about fudging the budget and that sort of thing, but an audit commission will actually reveal the state of the state.

I fear for my constituents down in Morphett, because there are so many things that we would like to do, not only for all of South Australia but in my case for my constituents in Morphett. The state government manages roads in Morphett: Brighton Road, Oaklands Road, Anzac Highway. In fact, somebody said to me the other day they are going to nickname Oaklands Road 'Rodeo Drive', because it is like riding a bucking bronco driving along there, with the corrugations and potholes. The state government owned roads are a disgrace. To top it off, until they changed the boundaries between Bright and Morphett, there was new bitumen in Bright and it stopped almost on the boundary of Bright and Morphett.

Mr Williams: Have they fixed that bridge yet?

Dr McFETRIDGE: I will come back to that. The new bitumen on Anzac Highway stops just inside my electorate. The member for MacKillop, the deputy leader, asked whether the state government has fixed the bridge down there? Well, no; not one cracker, not one cent came from this state government into fixing the King Street Bridge. The federal government, to give them their due, put in some money, but once again the ratepayers and the City of Holdfast Bay had to dip into their pockets and had to pay for that new bridge. It is a terrific bridge, and well done to all the contractors in the City of Holdfast Bay. We will not get the member for Schubert to paint it, because it is a really nice piece of architecture and engineering.

Another bit of infrastructure involving the Patawalonga that is of interest at this very moment is a new design for the Patawalonga gates at Holdfast Shores. I went to a Pat Watch meeting last week down at Glenelg. Instead of the old gates that go back 30 or 40 years—the old lifting gates, the motor driven gates—new hydraulic gates are to be put in. All the superstructure will be taken away and it will be opened right up. At about $3.5 million, it is a fantastic thing. A bit of money from the state government to manage that piece of infrastructure and upgrade it, which should have been done years ago.

The problem is, next to the Pat gates is the boat lock that lets boats go in from the Patawalonga moorings to the open sea. The walkway over that lock to enable visitors and residents to go from Holdfast Shores onto the peninsula at Glenelg North there is out of action when the lock opens. A walkway at both ends would overcome that problem. Designs are being put forward to put a walkway at both ends, but the state government is not going to fund it. The council will have to fund the lock because the state government, again, handed over the management of the lock, as it did the King Street Bridge, to the council.

This infrastructure—the King Street Bridge, the Pat gates, and the walkway over the Pat—is used not only by local residents but by hundreds of thousands of visitors. In fact an estimated 2.4 million visitors a year come down to Glenelg. It is a designated tourist area. People go for a walk along the beach there. For the state government to penny pinch and cause extra expense by not funding the walkway over the lock at Glenelg is just unbelievable.

It is about $400,000 to complete the whole structure with the extra walkway. It is not an insignificant amount of money, but in the scheme of things, the return of investment to this state, the return of taxes, levies and charges to this state from the people of Holdfast Shores and in my electorate of Morphett, it is millions and millions of dollars. The real estate down there is mega valued. It is returning the state millions in stamp duties and sales tax, in the work down there, payroll tax, you name it. The traders down there are doing their bit to help this state overcome the problems that we have. The need to just give them something in return by encouraging people to go down there, provide better facilities, is something that I think this government really needs to take a hard look at.

The federal government are not stepping in on this at the moment but, again, the ratepayers of Holdfast Bay, my constituents in Morphett, should not be paying for something which really is of huge benefit to the state. In just the same way as the state government penny pinches on Proclamation Day, they penny pinch on New Year's Eve.

There is no argument about it, they are state events. Thousands of people go down to the Bay on New Year's Eve, and hundreds go down there for the state celebration of Proclamation Day, yet the state government does not dip into its pocket. The need to spend some money in the electorate of Morphett is something that I have a passion about because we need to have all areas of our state—even those that qualify as being the more wealthy areas—having their fair share of return.

I should remind the house, though, that at Glenelg Primary School—which is a fantastic primary school, and the staff there do their very best to make sure the children get the best value from the education system—30 per cent of those kids are on school cards. Not everybody in the Bay, not everybody in Morphett is wealthy; there are many people who are doing it tough. Whether it is the lock gates, whether it is the roads down there, or the overpass at Oaklands Crossing. I know that the Minister for Transport said that I pre-empted a result by saying that there will be an overpass there, but my office said to me that in emails from his office the project was being referred to as the Oaklands Park Rail Overpass Project. It should have been there years and years ago, not just being considered now, as it is a huge bottleneck for traffic and buses at the Oaklands Crossing.

The issues in Morphett are not going to go away. I will be making sure that those sorts of issues such as Oaklands Crossing, the state of the roads, and the amount of funding that is being put back into Morphett by this government—or not being put back by this government—will become election issues, and I guarantee that the people of Morphett will re-elect me again.

Time expired.

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (17:11): It is interesting to see some of the information that has come out this week, particularly in response to the budget. Just as interesting is some of the misinformation that is coming out this week, and I want to talk a little about both. The piece of information that has astounded me, probably as much as anything is where the state is going, is where the indebtedness of the people of South Australia is going after 10 years of Labor government, when the shadow treasurer did the little exercise of working out just how we could think about the indebtedness that we are going to inherit in a couple of years as a result of 12 years of Labor management of the state.

It will mean that we have been borrowing at the rate of $4 million a day, every day, for eight years. The other interesting thing is that the level of indebtedness that we will get to will require interest payments of about $2.5 million a day. So we have been borrowing at the rate of $4 million a day and we are going to get to the point where we will be paying $2.5 million a day in interest, on and on and on, day after day.

Every South Australian should be horrified. The amazing thing is that we have been here before, not that long ago, and we had the minister for infrastructure explain to the house today that last time we were there some of the people who are voting today were not even born. That is the sad reality. He is trying to suggest that it was a historical event, so far back that we need not be concerning ourselves with it. To many of us, the State Bank disaster—and it was not just the State Bank, it was the South Australian government insurance office and a whole host of other disasters that occurred at the same time—I remember $60 million down the drain in a Scrimber project in Mount Gambier—

An honourable member interjecting:

Mr WILLIAMS: The Klunder blunder. There was a host of disasters around the State Bank that occurred at the same time but we have referred to it as the State Bank disaster, but we were there. It was not that many years ago, and it took a lot of hard work to claw back from that.

Today in question time the Minister for Infrastructure suggested that the Liberal government, in the nineties, should have resleepered the Gawler line. When we said, 'But you guys had broken the state and we had no money,' he suggested that it was so long ago we should not be talking about it. The reality is that when we were in government we did do some work on railway lines, we did resleeper the Adelaide to Outer Harbor line with convertible concrete sleepers. We did do that, but we did it pretty well at the end of our term of government. It has taken 10 years for Labor to actually wake up to the fact that resleepering and converting from wooden sleepers to concrete sleepers is something that should have been an ongoing program.

So the Minister for Infrastructure, trying to suggest that we failed when we were in government, refused to acknowledge that we were left in a budgetary situation where there was no money and also refused to acknowledge that we did, indeed, even without any money, implement a resleepering program and got it started. He then refused to acknowledge that it was10 years before the Labor government started to do any more resleepering and then failed to acknowledge that that was paid for by the commonwealth.

That points to the problem: of the infrastructure that has occurred in South Australia under this government—and this government keeps crowing about the biggest infrastructure build in the state's history—only a small portion of it has actually been funded by the state. A large portion of it has been funded by the commonwealth. If you add up all the infrastructure projects that are occurring in South Australia, as I did recently, and then deduct the finances coming from the commonwealth, you end up with a figure that is much less than the debt we are going to end up with in a year or two's time.

The reality is that the infrastructure that is being built in South Australia is all being built with borrowings, it is all being built with a credit card—and that is the problem. Notwithstanding that in all these years we had what has been referred to by everyone as 'rivers of gold'—with the GST payments, the property boom and the payment of conveyancing fees, etc., coming into Treasury—that money has just been wasted on recurrent expenditure.

We face a very bleak future here in South Australia because whoever is in power at the next election will inherit a budgetary situation that will need very, very strict management. The Labor Party has demonstrated consistently over the last 30 years that is not capable of doing that. So it will be an interesting future for the state.

I want to talk very briefly about another matter that was raised in question time today, and that was the matter of the desal plant. I asked some questions of the minister last week and again this week, and last Friday afternoon SA Water put out a statement saying that SA Water and AdelaideAqua, the constructors of the desal plant, had both come to an agreement to drop any legal action against each other for payments. That was all that was said. No details. I asked the minister about it prior to that announcement; he obfuscated. Today I asked him some more questions, and he obfuscated. He almost made out that he had no knowledge of what was going on, other than the fact that an agreement had been reached.

Whether or not an agreement had been reached, the reality is that the desal plant, from start to finish, has been a debacle. The decision to double the size of the desal plant was one of gross stupidity, and I challenge the minister to bring into the house and table the modelling that the government based its decision on. I do not believe there was any modelling; it was a purely political decision, and a stupid one at that. The long-suffering public of South Australia will pay for that stupidity for many, many years.

Not only was that a stupid decision, but the management of the project since has been, quite frankly, another absolute debacle. We saw that, in the contract, there were apparently penalty clauses that if the consortium constructing the desal plant did not achieve certain construction targets and deadlines, penalties would be imposed upon them. That is what John Ringham, the Chief Executive of SA Water, said publicly last December. To paraphrase, he said, 'There are penalty clauses and we will be imposing them,' as was reported in The Advertiser on, I think, 2 December last year.

Now we learn that the government and SA Water have walked away from that. There is no intention to impose any penalty clauses, and indeed, SA Water has apparently agreed to hand over tens of millions of dollars of extra money to AdelaideAqua, yet the minister will not answer any questions. The minister believes that the South Australian public does not deserve to know, notwithstanding that water prices have gone up by 40 per cent just in the last two years and will go up another 25 per cent as of 1 July this year. There has been a trebling of water prices since that stupid decision was made to build the desal plant at a capacity of 100 gigalitres—a trebling of the price of water—and yet we have all these questions about the management of the project, and the minister refuses to answer.

This is a responsible parliament where ministers are supposed to be responsible to the house: they are responsible by answering questions, yet this minister refuses to answer the questions. I can understand why, I can understand the minister's embarrassment, because this has been a bungled project from start to finish. The great pity is that the people of South Australia, because of this and a whole heap of other bungled projects, will be paying dearly for many years.

Time expired.

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