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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2019-05-01 Daily Xml
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Bills

Supply Bill 2019

Second Reading

Debate resumed.

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (17:35): It is a great innovation to have the digital recording of parliament because you can look up and see a confused look on the faces of people in the chamber and realise, 'Was I perhaps meant to be in the chamber?' You can assure yourself that that is the case and quickly get down here.

I rise to speak about the Supply Bill. This is a bill that is a peculiar aspect of our parliamentary system, where we basically give a big cheque to the government to spend a lot of money. We do that without any detail on what they want to spend that money on. We do it for a few months on the basis of granting some parliamentary approval before the actual budget is passed through both chambers of parliament to enable there not to be a reduction in or a cease of the supply of services in the state, which is very important. Obviously the opposition is supporting that supply. We do not want to do what the Fraser opposition did in 1975 and block supply, because we want schools and hospitals to remain open.

Mr Pederick: And you probably want to get paid—just that minor thing.

Mr PICTON: I think there is some detailed parliamentary questioning about whether parliament continues to operate even without supply being granted. Be that as it may, this is an important point at which we remark upon how the government is spending its money, how the government has decided that it should spend its money, how it should budget its money and how it should provide services in this state.

Wearing my hat as both the shadow minister for health and wellbeing and the member for Kaurna, I have particular concerns with what we have seen from this government over the past 14 months in terms of their decision-making on priorities for this state. Their priorities so far have been cuts, closures and privatisations. We have seen that in health, where, in an unprecedented move, corporate liquidators have been appointed to run some of our largest hospitals. They have been given the job not of improving clinical outcomes, not of making sure that patients are seen better, not so that we are listening more to our doctors and nurses; they have been given the job of cutting money out of our health system.

They have been tasked with cutting $460 million out of the health system over three years. For the first year of that, we saw the health minister patting himself on the back this week, saying what a good job he has done. It was very easy. They set themselves the target of $41 million. Apparently, most of that they got from updating their coding and updating the backlog of coding paperwork they had from when the move to the new hospital took place. That is pretty routine to do a catch-up of that. They have also done what other hospitals have been doing, particularly the Flinders Medical Centre, in trying to reduce the number of agency nurses. That has saved some money, and it is a good thing to do, and we were certainly embarking on that as a strategy previously.

But what we see is that the vast majority of the cuts that KordaMentha has been brought in to make are going to impact patients. They are going to impact beds, they are going to impact the number of operations performed in hospital and they are going to impact the number of doctors, nurses and other staff. That $460 million includes 180 beds that are going to close at our hospitals. It sets only 11 as a target in the first year but by the end of the third year there will be 180 beds closed every single night on average across the two major hospitals, the RAH and The QEH.

We also see that there are targets for reducing the number of operations. The equivalent of some 3,500 hip operations is their target to reduce the number of operations. These are not just some back-office savings. We had the health minister talking about savings on stationery that could be made—good and well, let's save some money on stationery—but to save $460 million at a hospital? This is about patients, doctors and nurses; it is about health services for the people of South Australia.

People are not stopping in terms of going to a hospital. We are seeing demand continue. Day after day, we regularly see our emergency departments at Code White. Almost every single night now we have at least one hospital at Code White, and quite often almost every single hospital is at Code White. That is where the emergency department is so overcrowded that they are at emergency levels.

We have seen ramping become an absolutely rampant (pardon the pun) issue where almost every single day ramping is occurring at some of our major hospitals. We have also seen a huge increase over the past year in terms of the number of patients who stay in emergency departments longer than 24 hours. Every single day we see too many patients stuck waiting for a hospital bed and, quite regularly, that is 80 to 90 patients a day. That has meant that very often we have about 10 patients a day who have been stuck in emergency departments waiting for access to a bed, which is not acceptable.

When we were in government, we worked methodically to bring that number down and we had brought that number down. We have now seen that number go up dramatically under this government. We have seen that this government's priority has been closing beds. They have closed 25 beds at Hampstead, where there is an empty ward sitting there that was operating until late November. We have seen a reduction in 16 beds at Flinders Medical Centre for medical patients. These are the vast majority of patients who need a bed from the emergency department at what is the state's busiest emergency department. There are now 16 fewer beds at Flinders Medical Centre because of the cuts of this government.

We have 10 beds sitting at Glenside that are empty. Meanwhile, the number of mental health patients stuck in emergency departments continues to grow. We do not have those beds open, we do not have the beds open at Flinders, we do not have them open at Hampstead. The government seems to be saying that they might close Hampstead, although there are no definitive plans on how they are going to do that or when that is going to happen. They might be closing St Margaret's, but there are no plans there.

All over the system we are seeing cuts and we are seeing corporate liquidators being put in charge, but what takes the cake is what we are seeing with SA Pathology. We are seeing potentially the whole thing being sold off to the highest bidder. The government is saying that in 11 months' time they might well sell off all of SA Pathology and leave us without a public pathology provider in this state. That will inevitably lead to higher costs for patients; less access for people, particularly in regional areas; slower response times; more tests being sent interstate and overseas; more jobs being sent interstate and overseas.

Inevitably that is what private laboratories do: they will move those jobs out of this state, and it will mean that we will not be teaching or training the next generation of workers. We will also not have the ability to do research in South Australia. This is a very dangerous proposition of privatisation that this government seems to be embarking upon when it comes to SA Pathology. We will fight them every step of the way on that because it is absolutely unacceptable. It is going to put health care in our state backwards. It is going to leave patients much worse off in this state.

We are already seeing a range of cuts that the government is proposing out of a PwC report it has received in terms of pathology. We have already seen that that includes closing collection centres. We have seen that that includes reducing opening hours, cutting many staff across our pathology services, and also it is going to include closing what is one of the most important areas of pathology, which is the excellent work we do in genetics in South Australia.

It is not only treating kids who have particularly bad issues such as bloodborne cancers and diseases, it is not only helping neonatal kids who have been born with particular genetic issues, it is not only helping kids before they are even born, while they are still in the womb, but it is also leading the next research and leading the next discoveries. We are really seeing massive progress being made on a whole range of different cancers and other diseases through genetics work.

If we close that, if we say goodbye to that, then not only are we depriving patients in South Australia of those services and the ability to access those services but we are also denying them the ability to access the next wave of technology and the next wave of treatments that could be available to them. That is an absolutely retrograde step. It is highly opposed by the key clinical groups in South Australia, who see that this is something that should stay open and should be more supported rather than less.

We have also seen this government decide to cut a whole range of different services in the health area such as SHINE SA and HIV services. These important clinical services help to divert people away from emergency departments and stay healthy in the community. We have had two clinics close. We have seen the northern suburbs clinic at Davoren Park close and the southern suburbs clinic at Noarlunga close, right in the areas where we need those health services. In those areas of need, those SHINE SA clinics are now closed. People now have to make the journey into the city.

The government say that they do not think it is a good idea, but they are the ones who cut funding to SHINE SA, forcing them to do this. They forced them to do this through their budget cuts and through their priorities in this budget, which is disgraceful. We have also seen the government single out a number of organisations, one being the HIV services provided through Centacare. They ran a service called Cheltenham Place, which provided care for sufferers of HIV and provided support for people who have what is obviously a horrible condition. The government has cut all funding to that and it is now closed. That is another closure that has occurred under them.

We have also seen the government cut all the funding to the Health Consumers Alliance, the organisation that is there to provide advocacy for patients to make sure that our health system is improving and that it listens to patients, not just to health bureaucrats. The government does not want to see them anymore, so they have cut all funding to them. They either will be forced to close or will stagger along with fewer resources and less ability to advocate on behalf of patients and also to train the next generation of patient advocates to speak up on behalf of patients and consumers in our health services.

We have also seen the government say that they now intend to close and cut the Mental Health Commission in South Australia. It is an organisation that minister Wade himself called for in opposition. The minister himself said in estimates that he had no intention of closing it. The government have now said that they intend to close this service, which is particularly disturbing for all those groups who work in mental health, particularly mental health consumers. They see the importance of a commission that provides independent advice and independent oversight of not just mental health services but how this state responds to the challenges of mental health and how it can have a preventative mindset to prevent mental health issues from occurring or getting worse in this state.

These are all retrograde steps that are happening under this government. We still have a lot more pain to come. It looks like the government is trying to butter people up for more cuts coming in next year's budget. I hope that is not the case because we have seen the impacts of those cuts already. In my own electorate, we have seen not only the impact of the SHINE SA cut that has taken away that service from the people of the southern suburbs but also the huge impact of the cuts that have already happened in terms of public transport.

The south has been singled out for cuts to public transport in a way that other areas of the state have not. We have seen the outer southern and outer northern suburbs, where people have the greatest tyranny of distance, be singled out by cuts from this eastern suburbs minded government. We have not seen many cuts at all in the eastern suburbs. We also have not seen many cuts in the Hills where the government has a lot of seats, which is pretty coincidental, but we see the outer north and the outer south being hit hard with cuts.

The government's line is, 'We've got these ghost buses running around with no passengers on them.' I actually put in the FOI to ask the government what the passenger data is for those buses that have been cut in my electorate. It turns out that some of those buses had quite a number of people on them. For each one of those buses running, every single day there were 20 people on them, and some of those have been cut. That is not a ghost bus: it is a bus that has been very well used and very much needed by the community, and its cut has been detrimental to people in the south.

I have spoken to many people who have found it much harder to get around, much harder to get to work, much harder to get to school, much harder to get to see their family and friends and much harder to get to the shops because of these cruel cuts by this government that does not view public transport as a service that should be provided but as something that they should be able to cut as much money from as possible.

I am particularly worried because the cuts so far announced are such a small sliver of what is about to come. They have already backed in a huge number of cuts, including some $36 million of cuts to public transport. We have only seen a few million of that cut so far. In these new tenders that are coming out that the Minister for Transport likes to spin as somehow being revolutionary for public transport, the people in my electorate know that that is just going to mean more cuts.

At the moment, there are six stops on Commercial Road in my electorate where a bus does not stop between 8.30 in the morning and 8.30 at night. For 12 hours, there is no bus serving that area in my electorate. Basically, it has got to the point where we do not have any bus services whatsoever in that area. It is a farce to say that it is still a bus stop when there are 12 hours in the middle of the day when there are no buses whatsoever going there. This government thinks that is acceptable. This government thinks that is how people in the outer suburbs should be treated, that they should fend for themselves.

The government also says that this is because we have the train line, so we do not want to have buses going near where train lines go. Sometimes these buses are running two or three kilometres away from where the train is going. This government thinks that it is okay for potentially a disabled person, a senior person or a kid to walk up to three kilometres to get to a train to get to where they are going. That is not acceptable. That is not the standard that South Australians expect from their public transport system in metropolitan Adelaide, and it is not something that we will stand by and watch. We will continue to fight these cuts to public transport, and I will continue to fight them in my electorate.

I am particularly concerned with this latest brainwave from the Minister for Transport that he is going to have Uber-style buses running around and that it will be so great because they will be able to pick you up from your door. This has disaster written all over it, and I think that we are going to see these cuts to services hitting the north and the south again. I am very fearful that we are going to see the Hills and the eastern suburbs protected because they protect their own patch. This is a government that does not care about people in the outer suburbs. They only care about their leafy inner-city mates, their voters in those areas or in the Hills, and that is detrimental to this state.

We will continue to fight their cuts. We will continue to fight both the cuts from the last budget and whatever Rob Lucas is cooking up now for his cuts in the next budget. The Liberals only know how to cut, they only know how to close things, they only know how to privatise things. South Australians have learnt this over the last 14 months since the election and we will continue to oppose those things.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mr Pederick.


At 17:54 the house adjourned until Thursday 2 May 2019 at 11:00.

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