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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2022-11-03 Daily Xml
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Bills

New Women's and Children's Hospital Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 2 November 2022.)

Mr TEAGUE (Heysen) (12:01): The situation that we faced last evening was an offer from those of us present to do all we could to take up our shovels and rush on down to the railyard, such was the urgency with which this debate was brought on yesterday via a suspension of standing orders immediately following the bill having been jammed through the Legislative Council.

We are finding that the government is finding itself in the invidious position of having to justify to the people of the state of South Australia why it is in such urgent haste to see this bill through the house, and why it is willing to treat the House of Assembly in its public pronouncements about this bill as easily characterised as no more than a rubber stamp is all really quite concerning. I am sure that the people of South Australia will form that view in relation to the way in which the government is going about this.

The opposition has been at pains to stress throughout the course of this debate its support for the building of the Women's and Children's Hospital. We want to see it done. What we are concerned about is this hasty and really very dramatic change of location, an extraordinary blowout in the cost that is projected for the construction of this building a decade from now and the blowout in the time that is required, to which I have just adverted.

We see that there is a project the government wishes to proceed with—there is a new way of going about it the government has just announced in recent days—but this is an extraordinary, expensive project becoming evermore expensive by the hour, taking a very long time indeed and affecting not only the future of health in this state but very significant aspects of heritage and the Parklands, all of which deserve at least the respect of proper scrutiny.

I am not going to go ahead and foreshadow the attitude of the government in the course of this debate, but I hope that I can be that persuasive. I hope that I can be that persuasive to bring the government to see that in order to chart a course in this state that will have such dramatic ramifications for the present and future generations, let alone an appreciation of our colonial and Indigenous history, this house should afford the members of this place and the community of South Australia the opportunity properly to consider what is going on.

What we have before us is a short bill, which has been described by numerous contributors to the debate already as one that is unprecedented and extraordinary in the territory it covers. It is a bill that runs to only 10 pages, one of which is a full-page of what I would describe—and I think I do service to this—as a mud map. It is no more than that.

The schedule to this bill sets out the project site and support zones in such broad-based terms that one would struggle to get beyond the geographical location of some distant-scale image, let alone be able to navigate the particulars. That is because the nature of this bill is to confer upon an individual minister extraordinary power to make future decisions, including the transfer of parkland to the minister in fee simple, including the destruction of State Heritage Places at the minister's discretion, and including provision for the relocation of South Australia Police facilities and the police horses to an area of the Parklands. I will come back to that in a moment.

What I want to focus on just for the moment is that the other extraordinary part of this conferral on the minister of powers is that the only minister who is even designated in this bill is the poor old minister responsible for the Police Act who is designated in part 5—Miscellaneous. That is extraordinary: it is headed Miscellaneous and dropped in at the back of this bill. The police minister is identified as the relevant minister on whom is conferred the capacity to acquire Parklands in fee simple to accommodate the police horses on their move.

Let's make no mistake about this. Let's just be steady and stepwise about what is going on. When the former government made plans to build the Women's and Children's Hospital, it designated—and I know because I signed off on it, and contrary to the Minister for Planning's mischaracterisation on 28 September in this house—the barracks in the health zone with a specific overlay for the sensitive re-use of those barracks within the health precinct. So I encourage members of the South Australian community and all members of this place to look carefully at the contribution of the Minister for Planning on 28 September, mischaracterising as he did the nature of that planning decision.

Re-use of heritage places is the gold standard—we know that, it happens all the time. Re-use is what was contemplated on the eventual move by police by the previous government. It is very important that we are accurate about this in the debate. The Minister for Planning was not and has not been in so characterising the nature of what was to be done under the previous government.

The next best in terms of preservation of heritage assets is to faithfully maintain in a move where practicable. We know that because the Burra Charter says so; the state Heritage Council has considered these possibilities. We know that those 10 police barracks buildings located at that site, the subject of state heritage, have already been the subject of an expression of concern by the state Heritage Council to the Deputy Premier in its letter of 13 October. There will be an opportunity to traverse that ground in the course of this debate.

What has been jammed into this house for urgent passage involves a combination of unprecedented shocks: a conferral upon a minister of the power to order the demolition, to order the acquisition of parkland and, by the way, to another minister (presumably another minister; I will get to that in a minute), to order the relocation of the horses, take on Parklands. I want to be clear about this re-use. We have known for some time that the police have contemplated a move. That was not part of the previous planning decision.

In fact, so distant was it that the previous government did not allocate any resources to the contemplation of any such move. It was not imminent; it was not associated with previous government's planning decision to see the move of those police horses. Again, we will traverse it in the course of the debate. It should be traversed in the course of a proper committee of inquiry upon an adjourned debate. We will do our best, given the constrained circumstances the government has forced on us.

Perhaps what is most startling about this most invidious set of circumstances the government now finds itself in is that, never mind their presence or otherwise in the chamber, the Deputy Premier, the minister for heritage, and the Minister for Planning, who splashed around in this space briefly in mischaracterising the debate on 28 September and has not been heard from since in this regard—neither of them are carrying the debate on what is a planning bill. Neither of them are around. What we do not know is whether or not either of them will be the minister for the purposes of this act, the minister who is referred to in nearly every paragraph of this short act: the minister's conferred power to take over land, the minister's conferred power to make a planning amendment.

The minister will now be the master of the Parklands, to the extent that may be necessary. To the extent that there is an ordinary planning process that might be involved in this space, it actually will not be all that much because the minister will be taking that on too. I do not know, but from the fact that the Minister for Health happens to be here leading the debate from the government's point of view, one might be forgiven for suspecting that the minister might be guess who? The minister for all these purposes might all of a sudden be guess who? The Minister for Health.

So the Minister for Health all of a sudden is going to be the minister for heritage, the Minister for Planning and the Attorney-General to relevant extents because this act as well confers power on said minister or ministers—there is a paragraph for each one; it could be any number of them—to amend any necessary legislation that might be felt necessary to achieve all these ends. Well may we say, 'All the way forward for the Women's and Children's Hospital,' because it seems that nothing is going to save the Parklands or those heritage buildings that for the time being are standing in their way'.

In the short time that I have remaining in my second reading contribution, I just want to advert to one other particular matter that I expect will be interrogated in the course of the committee stage of this bill if in no other way, and that is the curious set of circumstances in which part 5 of this bill has come about. Part 5 we will remember is headed Miscellaneous and contains clauses 10, 11, 12, 13, 14—

An honourable member interjecting:

Mr TEAGUE: —breathtakingly so—in relation to the relocation of certain SA Police facilities, the horses. What we saw, let's remember, on the announcement of this new plan, this startling new plan from the government, was that hand in hand with it came a provision of $2 million, as I recall, for SA Police to go about a search, imminent now as it is this necessary move.

Alright, so far so consequent on the plan to demolish the heritage buildings. So $2 million, and we heard from the commissioner in commenting on this, 'Yes, it is something that is a job of work. It is good to have the resources to do it,' and I think he described a five-kilometre geosearch in terms of being close enough to the CBD to make the important work of the police horses in the city feasible.

He talked about all kinds of possibilities that might be looked at with that $2 million, but no mention was made by the government—and I presume the reason there is no mention from the commissioner is that he is not aware either—that along down the track is going to come part 5, Miscellaneous, of this bill, which is suddenly going to say, 'Oh, well, don't worry. You can jam your police horses into the Parklands,' and take them over to the extent that the Minister for Police thinks might be a good idea to acquire in fee simple. That will all be explored in the committee. It is an outrageous process and it is no way to treat the people of South Australia.

The Hon. A. PICCOLO (Light) (12:17): I rise to briefly speak in support of this bill. I just remind members what this bill is about. I think it is very important to remind ourselves what this is about. What is the bill for? It is called the New Women's and Children's Hospital Bill 2022.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. A. PICCOLO: Mr Acting Speaker, I gave the member for Heysen and other members the due respect of listening to them. I did not agree with them, but I listened to them. I wish they would grant me the same courtesy.

The bill is for an act to facilitate the development of the new Women's and Children's Hospital and for other purposes, and that is why this bill is before us. It is appropriate for the Minister for Health to have carriage of this bill because, in the end, it is a facility he will be responsible for. It is about building the hospital, it is about building a world-class hospital and it is about building the right hospital in the right place.

That is what the Liberal Party cannot cope with, because the community accepts building the right hospital in the right place is the right decision. This is building a hospital for the future. That is the difference between what the Liberal Party wants to impose on the South Australian community—a substandard project. They are not my words, they are the words from a lot of people in the Liberal Party, too, and they are the words of most people in the medical profession.

The Liberal Party has said that they are opposed to this basically because their proposal was better. Actually, I have not heard anybody in the public domain say that it was better. With due respect, you have actually said that you were shovel ready to build it. Perhaps you were ready for the lawnmowers to cut some grass. I am not sure about the shovels.

The Hon. C.J. Picton: No shovels.

The Hon. A. PICCOLO: No shovels, just a bit of mowing.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. A. PICCOLO: Yes, so it is interesting to see that they are critical of what we are proposing—because what we are going to provide is a world-class proposal. When you look at the people who are critical of this, who is critical of this? The Liberal Party have been critical of it, essentially, and there are some people who are critical not so much of the hospital but of its location. I acknowledge that, and we will come to the heritage issues in a minute because there is nothing like a born-again heritage advocate.

During the last government, if there was one government that did a lot to trash heritage in this stage, it was the Liberal government. Those members who sit here now claiming to be advocates for heritage sat there saying nothing—absolutely nothing. Their silence was deafening.

Mr Telfer: You have gone the other way.

The Hon. A. PICCOLO: No, I haven't, not at all. I have been quite consistent. The member for Flinders interrupts, and he was actually the President of the LGA at the time, if I remember correctly. Quite rightly, on behalf of the LGA he expressed concerns about what the Liberal government was doing with the Planning and Design Code in terms of heritage in this state. I will come to that because it is very important.

The other criticism is that this bill has been rushed. On the one hand, the Liberal Party are telling us they were shovel ready; now they want us to delay this project. You cannot have it both ways. It is quite clear that the proposal by this government is supported by more people in the community than their proposal. It is as simple as that. They are trying to find some weasel words to actually withdraw from what was really a substandard proposal they had put before the election. Well, the election made it quite clear. We went to an election committing our government to a world-class Women's and Children's Hospital, and that is what we will deliver.

What this bill does—and why it is very important that we are debating this bill today—is it makes sure we have certainty about the direction the government is taking with the hospital. It is important that all the relevant government agencies, and the industry who are going to build it, know what we are about to do. This bill is the foundation for this hospital, in the sense that it enables us to actually start the work on it and, importantly, to deliver on that promise.

I acknowledge, as other speakers have, that there are people who are critical of the location and the impact it will have. This is something the government will have to address. Certainly, the government has to do some work to rebuild, in some elements, our credentials in terms of heritage. I am sure we will do that. I note that the Minister for Planning has already started doing some work in improving that.

I come to heritage because when the previous minister—not the previous minister but the minister before him, who was then the member for Schubert—the Minister for Planning and Infrastructure introduced the Planning and Design Code, one thing the code did was trash conservation zones and local heritage listings in this state. It basically removed all protections for those things in this state. It is interesting that the members who are now pro heritage said nothing at the time. Not one of them stood up in this place and expressed concern.

It was under political pressure that the new Minister for Planning, the member for Bragg, because probably a lot of her electorate were against it as well—the then membership for Bragg, I should say, as that has changed as well since then. What that decision enforced was to force councils to spend much-needed funding to get all these local places revisited in terms of their local heritage. My own council spent $200,000 of important ratepayer money on something that should not have happened.

In the end, they did back off, but that was only under political pressure from both the opposition of the day and a number of alliances and community organisations that campaigned strongly against it. It fell on deaf ears within the Liberal Party for a long time, how we would decimate the heritage of a number of streets and locations throughout the state. Particularly in the electorate of Adelaide, there were a whole range of campaign groups who were concerned about the way the Liberal Party, the Liberal government of the day, were going to trash whole elements of landscape.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. A. PICCOLO: We are. We are talking about heritage because that is what speakers talked about—heritage. I am talking about heritage, because it is important, and the credentials of the opposition on heritage. It is very important to talk about heritage because in the end governments have to weigh up the pros and cons of proposals and, at times, make decisions that are very difficult. In the end, we have made that decision.

As not only I but also members of the Liberal Party have said quite publicly, we have made the right decision. In fact, yesterday a letter from Michael Pratt was read out to this chamber. He made a bit of a 'Pratt' of the Liberal Party in terms of his commentary, didn't he? This is a person who has been a Liberal Party member—if not still a Liberal Party member—for many years; in fact, he was the federal Liberal member for Adelaide. He referred to the Liberal Party as 'hapless', if I remember correctly. That is where the Liberal Party stands today: nitpicking this bill for some minor thing, rather than saying, 'Come on board, we support this, the community supports it. This is a better proposal. Let's make it happen.'

As people have said, this government will be thanked for doing the right thing, making the right decision, making sure that we have a world-class hospital for women and children. Importantly, we are going to futureproof this building as well—both the RAH and the Women's and Children's should they need to be upgraded in the future. That is what the previous proposal by the Liberal Party prevented. It actually built a hospital for today but not for tomorrow, not for the next decade or the next generation. What do people in the community want? They want governments to make decisions that are futureproofed—and we are doing that.

It is important that governments plan, implement and build for the future and not for electoral cycles. Clearly, the Liberal Party's proposal for their Women's and Children's Hospital was an electoral cycle project. It was designed to get them across the line at the 2022 election and it did not. The community saw through that. That is why I am supporting this bill—because it facilitates a very important project, namely, the Women's and Children's Hospital to be built as soon as possible, as soon as practicable, and to be a world-class hospital.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (12:27): It is a great pleasure to sum up this debate. I particularly thank speakers for their contribution, particularly the member for Light, who I significantly agree with, and also the other members whose comments I significantly disagree with. This is a really important piece of legislation for the future of our state, to make sure that we have this hospital built on a site that provides land that is suitable and land that has the space available—this site has double the size of land compared with what was being looked at previously on the RAH west site—and to make sure that we can get that process started as soon as possible.

As has been talked about, this is a project that has been planned and proposed in South Australia for a very long time and, under successive governments, has not been able to get to the point of being developed. There were a number of comments from the other side that this was somehow ready to go and that shovels were poised, ready for deployment on that site. That is absolutely not true. There were very significant issues that had to be dealt with. It was absolutely completely incorrect, and it is absolutely a fallacy to say that there was any ability that shovels were going to be in the ground for a project that was still being worked on in terms of what the blocking and stacking were going to be at the start of this year when we came to government with a number of clear issues that had been identified.

Part of the issue that fundamentally could not be solved on that RAH west site was how to fit services connected on the same level, how to fit the operating theatres and the intensive care services on the same level. This was an issue that had been raised over the successive nine years that this project had been talked about and it was under successive governments. The problem was that the land was just too small for that to happen.

When we came to government, we were briefed on the project. We were told that there had been more work on trying to find and eke out more space on that site. It was now going to encroach further on the Royal Adelaide Hospital—still not being able to fit all those services, but slightly better than had been proposed previously—and, by doing that, it added to the cost, added to the time frames and also added to the complexity and risk to the operations of the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

It would have had to be built across the road that goes into the Royal Adelaide Hospital and the Royal Adelaide Hospital emergency department. This obviously had a number of substantive risks to the RAH. By being built closer to the RAH and the helipad on the RAH, it would have meant that the infrastructure that had to be put in place would have had to be much more highly strengthened, adding additional cost to the project as well. A number of these issues were still being worked through when we formed government in March, and we were still trying to find solutions to some of those intractable problems.

As I said in my second reading speech, we well could have just continued on that path and come up with an imperfect solution to those issues, blamed it on the last guys and been done with it. However, we decided that that was not the best outcome for the state for the future for a number of reasons. One is clearly the outcome in terms of the Women's and Children's Hospital and, secondly, the outcome in terms of the Royal Adelaide Hospital as well.

Depriving the RAH of its future expansion space is a critical risk for the future of healthcare delivery in this state because I think that it is clear that, at some stage—I am not sure if it is 10 years or 20 years or 40 years' time—the RAH will have to expand and provide additional space. If we took up that small pocket of land next to it, then that would have caused significant problems, so we went down this path.

I think it is worth noting that this was not something that came out of nowhere. This is an issue that has been raised repeatedly over the past few years, in terms of the limitations of that site, the lack of beds on the site, the concerns about the service offering that would be part of that new hospital and the concerns that despite the claims that have been made it would not be a truly world-class hospital.

As such, I want to thank a number of people who have worked hard behind the scenes to raise that in the public consciousness over the past few years and have also been key elements in terms of our decision to make sure that we take the hard decisions to put a hospital in place for the long term. I do want to thank Emeritus Professor Warren Jones and Dr John Svigos from the Women's and Children's Hospital Alliance, who have worked tirelessly in terms of promoting the need for improvement in services at the hospital, both at the current hospital and also at the future hospital.

They have been doing this tirelessly over the past few years. There have been times I know when both of them have felt: were they going to get anywhere, was this going to deliver an outcome? I think that they can now see that there is a very significant change that has come about because of their advocacy, because they have put their hand up on behalf of the clinicians in the hospital to raise these concerns, and that we are now going to deliver a bigger and better hospital.

A number of other people have been involved in that work as well. I want to thank Dr Steve Keeley, who has also raised a number of these concerns, as well as probably a number of other doctors who might not wish to be publicly named. I also thank Phil Palmer, who has recently joined the Women's and Children's Hospital Alliance, providing support to Warren and John in their efforts as well. Raising those concerns and putting them at the forefront has given us the understanding of the importance of making sure that we build that hospital for the long term and that we do not build a substandard hospital that is going to be full by the day it opens.

Further to that point, I want to thank Bernadette Mulholland and SASMOA. Bernadette has spent a lot of time over the past few years at the Women's and Children's Hospital, both in terms of the issues at the current hospital, in terms of its staffing arrangements—and that led to our policy formulation in relation to additional resources going into that hospital, which are now being deployed—and in terms of what the future of the Women's and Children's Hospital needs to be at the new site, the new hospital. Her advocacy has been strident on behalf of the medical staff particularly and I think the staff more broadly at the hospital in raising these concerns, so I want to thank Bernadette for her work as well.

I also want to thank SA-Best, in particular the Hon. Connie Bonaros for the work that she led through the health services committee of the other place. They held hearing after hearing focused on the Women's and Children's Hospital, focusing on issues in terms of staffing, issues in terms of culture and services and also issues in terms of the development of the new hospital. It is in no small part because of the efforts of Connie and that committee's work, and the evidence that it uncovered, that has led us to making these difficult decisions in terms of making sure that we have this hospital for the long term.

Obviously, as I have said in the parliament previously, I want to thank the crossbenchers in the other place, particularly Connie Bonaros MLC, Frank Pangallo MLC and Sarah Game MLC, who were supportive of this legislation in the other place and made sure that we could make it a reality by opposing a number of the amendments and delay tactics that were put up by both the Liberal Party and the Greens in the other place that would have led to us not having this debate in this chamber today.

I also want to thank so many of the doctors, clinicians, nurses and allied health staff and other officials who work in the Women's and Children's Hospital who have been working very hard on this project. I will single out Jodie Dodd and Laura Willington, who have been working very hard in terms of the development of the model and in particular the development of the model in relation to women's intensive care services at the hospital site, which has been very well received by staff across the hospital. I think we will deliver a much more beneficial outcome in terms of being able to provide those services for women and their babies in the same hospital and making sure that they can stay in the same hospital.

Lastly, I would like to thank the team who have worked on this, in particular, as I have mentioned previously, Jim Hallion, who was appointed to lead the work in looking at the site options. I really want to thank him for his work and for accepting the call-up to do this. I also thank Jim Birch for also being a significant part of that work on that team. He was also clearly part of the work previously in looking at sites. I thank them for the result of that work that has led us to where we are today.

I also thank Brendan Hewitt and the entire project team. They now have a big task ahead of them in getting this project and this hospital built—getting it done. We want to make sure this happens as quickly as possible but in the best way possible to deliver those improved health outcomes for future generations to come.

I commend the bill to the house. This is a significant day. While some suggested this was unprecedented, we did some research and there was a piece of legislation that this very house debated some 109 years earlier about this exact site; the parliament decided to put a police barracks on that site and now we are deciding to use that exact same site for a hospital. So this is a significant day. In a similar way, this will be a hospital that I have no doubt will last for a hundred years on that site, delivering excellent care for women, their babies and children of this state for many, many years to come.

Bill read a second time.

Committee Stage

In committee.

Clause 1.

Progress reported; committee to sit again.

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