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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2022-05-03 Daily Xml
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Election Commitments

Ms PRATT (Frome) (17:03): My question is to the Premier. When will the Premier deliver on all his election commitments on health?

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier) (17:04): Many of the commitments we took to the election we anticipate will be fully completed and honoured by the next election, due in March 2026. There are other elements of the policy that we took to the election that we don't anticipate will be completed until after four years' time. Take, for instance, the election commitment we made regarding the Mount Barker hospital. We made it very clear at the time that this was a project we anticipate would be finished by 2027.

Clearly, and as the member for Frome would understand—and I take this opportunity to congratulate the member for Frome on her election as a new member of the parliament and I applaud her on her achievement to be working in this place with extraordinary privileges. As the member for Frome would well understand, things such as large-scale hospital infrastructure take time to build, but the vast bulk of the health policy that we took to the election we anticipate we can deliver in the next four years.

Take, for instance, the policy commitments that we made around health staffing. Our commitment to deliver 350 additional ambulance officers will come online progressively throughout the course of this term. From memory—and I am looking to the Minister for Health for confirmation—99 of those ambulance officers we will have employed by 1 July next year and a similar number in respect of the nurses. In respect of the 100 additional doctors, we have committed that 24 of them will be online by 1 July next year.

So what the member for Frome can reasonably expect is that those policies with time lines that were enunciated as part of our policy will be honoured. Thus far we are on track to meet them. In fact, we are in advance of where we anticipated we would be at this relative point in time upon forming office.

The health minister and I, along with the newly formed subcommittee of cabinet to deal with COVID measures, the EMC subcommittee of cabinet, received advice upon being elected, advice that presumably the former government had in its possession, that the number of COVID cases as a result of a wave that was being endured by the end of the election campaign was going to be a significant challenge for our health system to deal with.

We decided to immediately act. We didn't engage in a political exercise in terms of asking the question why nothing happened over the course of the Omicron wave to gear up hospital capacity rapidly. What we have done since then is put on in excess of 150 additional hospital beds into our system in the space of weeks. The member for Frome, I am sure, would appreciate just how substantial an effort is required to achieve such a significant milestone.

I took particular pride in the extraordinary hard work that had been put in by South Australian public servants in and around Modbury Hospital where, from memory, an additional 24 beds were put online from what was largely a disused ward. It was almost like a backyard blitz exercise, people working around the clock, completely refurbishing a whole section of Modbury Hospital to put on an additional 24 beds.

We made that funding commitment, we made it urgently, and we got action in place to put those beds online to deal with the challenge that our health system is currently enduring. But we have a big challenge ahead, a big policy to deliver upon, and we will honour the time lines that we enunciated in the lead-up to the election.

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