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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2024-04-30 Daily Xml
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Women's and Children's Hospital

Ms O'HANLON (Dunstan) (14:31): My question is to the Premier. Can the Premier update the house on the progress of the new Women's and Children's Hospital?

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier) (14:31): That is a great question from the member for Dunstan, because I know the member for Dunstan has a great interest in the women and children in her electorate. The good news for each and every one of those is that, of course, this government doesn't just have a plan for the Women's and Children's Hospital to get us through the next few months but one that will actually see us into the long term.

The existing Women's and Children's Hospital has been looking after women and children in our state for over 100 years. What we have decided to do as a government and what we are determined to execute is a policy to make sure that the new Women's and Children's Hospital will also service the community for up to 100 years.

The plan that was in place previously would have built a hospital with one extra overnight paediatric bed—one. A $2 billion hospital with only one extra bed. It was our view as a government this was unsatisfactory. In order to be able to redress that, what we decided to do was to actually develop a plan for a bigger hospital. That required some tough decisions, including the tough decision on building on the Thebarton barracks. That has been opposed by those opposite, but we are getting on with it.

What we are going to see at the end of this is a far bigger hospital, a hospital that has been designed through probably one of the most comprehensive clinical consultation efforts in the history of us building new hospitals in our state, and also a far better form of amenity in and around that area of our park lands: the olive groves preserved and accessible, the Old Adelaide Gaol opened up and accessible, far better public amenity and public access, and also a brand-new hospital within it.

Today I was very glad to be joined by the health minister, and also the member for Adelaide, for the first sod turn on the first stage of that construction, which of course will be the car park—a car park that, you got it, is going to be a lot bigger than the existing car park. Everything about this hospital will be bigger. There will be 1,300 car parks. This is the first tranche of the project and then it will progress from there. We are aiming to have the hospital built by 2031. It is a seven-year build. It is a massive exercise.

Let me say this rather candidly, not something you would normally expect someone from the Treasury benches to say on a project of this nature: this project is so big and so complex in its scale that there will be hiccups, there will be things that go wrong. You can't do a kitchen renovation without something going wrong. This is infinitely more complex. But we are alive to those challenges and we are going to work through each and every one of them because the objective here is to build an outstanding facility that sets us up for the long term.

For those who are frothing at every opportunity to be critical of the project, well you can criticise, that is your prerogative, but our responsibility is to actually think about the long-term future of our state on such an important institution as this one. We can talk about the dollars, we can talk about the bed numbers, we can talk about the number of people who will be working within this building and it is all larger, but what really matters here are the people who will be the beneficiaries of the services within it.

There is going to be an awful amount of joy that happens in this hospital: people recovering, children being born, but there will also be people who are confronting some of the most challenging of circumstances that any child or parent can imagine. It is important that they are able to be cared for in a compassionate way but also in a way that represents the highest quality care that money can buy in a first-world country with a state's economy going as well as this one and that is why we are so excited to see this project reach an important milestone today.

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