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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-06-26 Daily Xml
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Bills

Appropriation Bill 2025

Estimates Committees

Adjourned debate on motion:

That the proposed expenditures referred to Estimates Committees A and B be agreed to.

The SPEAKER: I expect the crowd is going to stay to listen to the end of this.

Mr TEAGUE (Heysen—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (17:42): I will not be surprised, because this is really startling stuff. What the Attorney did instead—and I give him credit—was put it back to me as though he were writing the script for the Utopia episode that was unfolding.

The Treasurer will be interested in this, in a different way to how I suspect he is interested in having to wrestle with the Department for Child Protection, in that there was this interesting exchange in which the Attorney said to the committee in response to a question from me:

It would of course be very hard to complete a building project like this without any land. You need to build on the land. So that takes into account the acquisition for the funding of the land—

That was what we had. Those of us following along for the last few years have seen the project cost $348 million to complete the new forensic science centre—much needed, urgent, important for the best people in South Australia doing the most amazing work in South Australia—and they are going to have that by June 2028. They have just been told, on the face of this budget paper, that no, they are not: they are going to have it by June 2031 now. There is a not very good explanation for that, as might have been appreciated.

The explanation for the $14 million of extra cost was: 'That is just the money for the land that we need to build the building on.' So somebody has had a bright idea about that in the last year or so. For those who want to follow that in any greater detail, there it all is. I have made reference already to the government's illusory hydrogen project, the $593 million hydrogen project that was supposed to be up and running and delivering power by 2025, which was about now when last I looked.

We have had reference already to what is still kind of in the mix in terms of being able to pin down cost and time for delivery of the new Women's and Children's Hospital. We will continue to interrogate by how much that is blowing out in terms of dollars and time. But what we had here in the course of an otherwise pretty well performed, orderly Attorney-General's budget process was this almost ludicrous, almost risible subject matter of a Utopia episode where you have somebody now accounting for the cost of land for a project that has been on the books for years and a three-year delay for no good reason whatsoever.

So I say, as we come back to the house following that process, that members of this house on all sides will be very concerned indeed on behalf of those world-leading experts at the forensic science centre of South Australia, concerned to ensure that they do not end up with the same outcome as those who were in an office that used to exist at the hydrogen office of this government, who found that the product of that project, that $593 million project, turned out just to be illusory, with no hydrogen generated. As the minister breezily tells us, such component parts that might have been partially constructed might end up getting delivered so that they can be sold off for parts down the track, but otherwise there is nothing to show for the $593 million project that has been described for years.

We can add the forensic science centre of South Australia to that sorry checklist for the time being, and it is a sad duty to report that particular outcome from this estimates process. It is all there from Tuesday's estimates, and I refer particularly to page 252 of Hansard in that respect.

To return to where I started, in the biggest picture sense, South Australians will have a clear realisation that what this government has brought to them over the course of these now three long years and more is a burden of state debt that is unprecedented, heading out to $48.5 billion, yet another year of agency by agency budget incompetence to the tune of a billion dollars or more of budget blowouts, and that has been demonstrated so very clearly in just those two agency areas that have been the subject of part of that analysis.

It is all there for South Australians to see. South Australians deserve better and we would all do well to pay close attention from here until March on that checklist, not of how much we have spent and how many have been added over budget to the books of each agency, but what outcomes have been delivered against promises? What management of scarce resources has been demonstrated by responsible ministers, or irresponsible ministers as the case may be? What capacity has this government demonstrated to South Australians for the responsible management of scarce public funds?

We of course have a lot more to say over the journey about what policy reform looks like to guide improvement. For the moment, the focus is on the budget as it properly is. The estimates process has served its purposes, including those that I have enumerated just now.

We will continue to hold the government to account over these final months of its term in power. South Australians can look forward to a bright new future beyond next March where, with a change of government, we can see a return to the responsible management of scarce resources, a day-to-day competence in service delivery, and the keeping of faith and trust that South Australians deserve.

With those short words, I conclude my remarks in terms of my contribution to the report on the estimates committee. There will be a lot more to say over the months ahead.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mr Odenwalder.

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