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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-11-16 Daily Xml
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COVID-Ready Road Map

Mr MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Leader of the Opposition) (14:39): My question is to the Premier. What is the Premier's response to business leaders who have criticised the lack of guidance that has been provided about the reopening plan? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr MALINAUSKAS: Martin Haese from Business SA said, 'Business has been nervous about this entire situation since March/April 2020. In many ways, that scenario has not materially changed.' Ian Horne, from the AHA, said the plan 'raises as many questions as it answers'.

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:40): I would like to quote from Martin Haese from 2 o'clock yesterday afternoon. He says, 'Well done, Premier.' I don't know if Mr Haese is contacting you directly. He's certainly contacting me directly. The reality is I think that people are very—

Mr Malinauskas interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL: —pleased that we have taken away the threat of statewide lockdown and moved to a more suitable arrangement as the risk has diminished. The only reason why we can do this is because the people of South Australia have presented themselves for vaccination.

In the first instance, some people were reluctant. They weren't sure that they should go and have that vaccination, but as they have seen across the border in New South Wales and Victoria and in the ACT with high numbers becoming infected and high numbers going into hospitals, being admitted to ICU, ventilators and, of course, people dying in those circumstances, we know that the vast majority of them are people who are unvaccinated.

So, whilst this has been occurring, more South Australians have been presenting themselves for vaccination. I mentioned some of the statistics in my previous answer. As the vaccination rate goes up, of course the risk of transmission comes down, and this provides us with the opportunity to reduce those restrictions, whether they be the test, trace, isolate and quarantine protocols or our public health social measures.

As I was saying in my previous answer, we now continue to increase our vaccination rate. This is going to further protect the people of South Australia and will provide us with an opportunity to update the TTIQ protocols and also the public health social measures as we get closer to 90 and beyond. I have every confidence—I have absolutely every confidence—that we will get to 90 per cent and then we will get beyond 90 per cent. This is the experience interstate. What we are seeing now in New South Wales, in ACT and in Victoria are very high numbers for vaccination. We are also seeing the numbers of new infections coming down.

We have a different situation from those states because we haven't had the heavy level of seeding that they had. We are coming to it later, and we still want to put those speed bumps in the way of this disease as it comes across the border by requiring people to be double-vaccinated, checked before they come in and, of course, as a case emerges, we put those people and direct contacts into a form of quarantine and we monitor the health of those other more casual contacts.

We know that the business sector is very happy that we haven't required everybody to do 14 days. We have provided a great deal of detail yesterday, which was made available to the entire population, on our general approach. We will have more specific sector or industry approaches which will be even more bespoke, more nuanced, more tailored to the requirements of those sectors and they will be rolled out in the coming days.

To most people, they will never consult that spreadsheet. To most people, they will probably never even see that spreadsheet. What they will do is receive a call from the Communicable Disease Control Branch—these are the contact tracers, these are the people who are doing the work—when they identify a case to put people into an appropriate level of protection, whether that be monitoring, whether it be testing or ultimately whether it be a quarantine situation.

We have some trying times ahead. There is no doubt about that. But we come at this in a way which I think is based on evidence, based on science, based on the experts within SA Health. They have served us well in the past and I expect this will continue into the future.

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