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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-10-28 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

COVID-19

Mr MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Leader of the Opposition) (15:33): This has been an important week in the context of South Australia's immediate future because we are about to embark on a very substantial transition, quite deliberately, of going from living in a state that is COVID free to living in a state that has made a conscious policy decision to have COVID come in.

I think there are a lot of South Australians who welcome the news of being able to travel interstate relatively freely, but there are other South Australians who do have a degree of concern and trepidation about what COVID coming into South Australia means for them, particularly in the event that they contract COVID, which of course will happen. There has been no shortage of representations made to me, and I think to every member in this place, that they are worried about the preparedness of our health system to be able to deal with COVID.

The truth is that none of us knows exactly what is going to happen. The government has assured us that everything that can be done has been done to prepare our health system, but it is also true that day after day, including today, we have seen clinicians coming out on the public record desperately frustrated that our hospital system is not operating at full capacity because there are resources laying idle, principally through a lack of resourcing around staff.

This state government made a decision to make hundreds of staff redundant, including nurses, during the course of the pandemic. That strikes us as a novel approach. I cannot think of too many other places around the world that during the course of a global pandemic decided to make nurses redundant—an extraordinary act. Nonetheless, the government has assured everyone that everything is fine.

What we do know is that, irrespective of how this transition to living with COVID goes over the course of the months ahead, in years to come our children are going to look back on this moment and ask, 'What was all that about?' because hopefully the world will have moved on, whether that be in five years or 10 years or 20 years' time. What we have to work on assiduously is an exercise ensuring that we have a policy for the future that guarantees the legacy of COVID is not just a bad memory and a ginormous debt. We have to ensure that the legacy of COVID is a transformational moment when collectively we actually delivered something that set us up for generations into the future.

That is why on this side of the house we have not been preoccupied with internal division: we have been preoccupied with actually developing that policy. On the weekend, we announced a very substantial policy in that regard, a policy to comprehensively invest in our education system because that is the lever that will determine the future prosperity of the state more than anything else.

We are unapologetic about not going to this election with a short-term view, with a short-term policy, with three slogans, to try to just get us over the line. We are committed to a long-term vision, a long-term policy and a strategy to set up our kids for the future. They have already paid a big enough price in respect of COVID. We owe them a legacy that makes a material difference. More than that, we have announced another comprehensive policy that sets us up for the future.

In coming days, the world's eyes are going to be on Glasgow, an absolutely critical moment that yet again has been characterised as our last chance to properly address what is sincerely a great moral challenge of our times. I note that today it has been reported in The Australian that the nation's former Chief Scientist, Dr Finkel, has said in regard to hydrogen:

It's the opportunity to take renewable energy captured in one continent and send it around the world to countries that don't have enough of their own.

He went on to say, 'The scale of that hydrogen export opportunity is almost beyond imagining. But let's try.' Well, there is only one party that wants to try here in South Australia when it comes to hydrogen.

They have a plan for hydrogen, to sell off an asset that is currently publicly owned that could be central to a hydrogen capacity in this state. We have a $500 million-plus policy to give us the hydrogen industry of the future. Hydrogen for the future, education for the future, policy and vision for the future—that is what we have on this side of the house. On the other side, they have a rabble that is divided, and today we see that yet again.

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