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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
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HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PROJECTS

Adjourned debate on motion of Hon. R.I. Lucas:

That this council notes with concern the government's management of IT projects within Health.

(Continued from 13 November 2013.)

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS (21:48): I rise to continue speaking to this important issue in relation to South Australian health and its management, or mismanagement, of IT projects. At the outset, I want to correct an error in the Hansard transcript from my contribution two weeks ago. In the section of my contribution I refer to two separate probity complaints. The first I refer to relates to the ESMI project and a reference to a Ms Kate Phillips and then later on I am reported as saying:

Similarly, in relation to the EPAS project, I am told again that a probity complaint has been lodged with the probity director for this project, who is again Ms Kate Phillips...

That Hansard should record EPLIS (Enterprise Laboratory Information Systems) rather than EPAS. So, in that particular paragraph for those avid readers of Hansard, the probity complaints that have been lodged, or so I assert, are in relation firstly to the ESMI project and the EPLIS project. I am not aware as to whether or not one has been lodged in relation to the EPAS project.

Last week in summary I highlighted what I believed was a growing scandal of tens, possibly hundreds, of millions of dollars in relation to SA Health's management over a long period of time of IT projects. I also asserted that minister Snelling was desperate to keep much of this growing scandal hidden at least until after the March 2014 election where if he is elected, of course, eventually one would hope that it is revealed in dribs and drabs. If there is a change of government, we would hope there would be a lancing of the boil and all of the gory detail can be released for the public to be made aware of very quickly.

I spoke last week and I am speaking again this week because I have been frustrated in terms of trying to get answers to questions that I have asked on this particular issue. In September of this year I put questions to SA Health executives, David Swan and others, in the Budget and Finance Committee and here we are nearing December and we still have not received responses to those particular questions. Questions have now been put over a period of three or four weeks to minister Snelling in the House of Assembly and minister Snelling continues to make outlandish statements, unsupported by fact, and in other cases indicates that he has not been briefed or he is unaware or he will go off and check but, of course, he never comes back with a reply after he says he has gone off to check.

I do not want to waste my time this evening picking apart everything that minister Snelling has said; there will be other occasions to do that. I would like to spend my time outlining the detail of some of the problems. The best example I think of the negligence or incompetence, or both, of minister Snelling is demonstrated by his response to a question from the member for Norwood when he was asked: has the minister decided now to only roll out EPAS to the Port Augusta Hospital GP Plus sites and a 15-bed ward at the Repat Hospital prior to the March election next year? As part of his response he said, 'In terms of the project (that is the EPAS project as a whole) it is on time and on budget.' There we have minister Snelling in the house indicating that the $422 million EPAS project is on time and on budget. That is just palpably untrue.

There is just so much evidence, some of which I have put on the record and some of which I would hope at some stage either SA Health will concede or the Auditor-General will concede when he comes before Budget and Finance Committee. It is quite clear that EPAS was meant to have rolled out by June of next year (June 2014). At the very earliest the IT insiders and Treasury insiders are saying it will be late 2015, so a delay of some 15 to 18 months. Those pessimists amongst the observers believe that it could be as late as late-2016 or almost two years later than first predicted. For minister Snelling to say in the house that EPAS is on time and on budget, as I said, is unsupported by fact and is palpably untrue.

As I said, I am not going to pick apart all of the errors and inconsistencies in minister Snelling's statements to the house. I want to outline the extent of the problems that we have within SA Health in terms of its management of IT projects. I am advised that, as of this week, a Mr Paul Farrow, who only three weeks ago had been appointed as one of the new head honchos in SA Health IT, as the director of EPAS operations, was dismissed. That was three weeks after he had been appointed in a process presided over by the newly-appointed director of IT, or eHealth programs, Mr Michael Long, who commenced work only in May of this year. Here we have a new senior executive appointed just three weeks ago who, I am informed as of this week, has been dismissed.

There are clear questions there as to what was the process of appointment of Mr Farrow: did that appointment go through the full selection panel process required of senior executive appointments? If it did not, why didn't it? What were the reasons for the early termination of Mr Farrow after only three weeks? Did it have anything to do with claims that he made on his CV in terms of his background expertise and experience? If it did, why were they not checked prior to his appointment? If there were other reasons for the dismissal, what were those other reasons? The minister should also come clean and indicate what, if any, termination payments had to be made to Mr Farrow in terms of terminating his appointment.

I am also advised that senior officers in relation to the administration of EPAS have, in recent times, written to both Mr Swan and to Mr Michael Long, expressing their grave concern at the new direction the EPAS project has taken over the last couple of months. I am also advised that another individual has also written to Mr Swan, expressing that person's lack of confidence in Mr Long in terms of his management of the IT programs within Health.

There is still a position in relation to the management of this $422 million EPAS project. Key positions are unfilled, people have resigned, people are in the position of contemplating leaving the project, they are concerned at the lack of commitment from the minister and from Health to the project, they are concerned at the changes in direction to the project, they are concerned at the minister's decision to try to hide or delay exposure of the EPAS rollout until after the state election, they are concerned at the increased costs that will mean to the project, they are concerned that it may well mean that further key people will leave the project, setting in train a never-ending circle of trauma for the project as more money is wasted on delays. As more key people leave the project the challenge for those remaining in terms of implementing the project becomes more and more significant.

The other issue I want to raise, which has been provided to me recently, is a very significant concern in relation to security of the EPAS system. As I indicated when I last spoke, the original scope, which had been approved, had a security of what was called twin factor authorisation. Given the sensitive nature of the information—that is, all the clinical information of patients would be included in the system—what would be required to access the system will be not only a swipe card but also a separate PIN number; that is, twin factor authorisation. However, the government and the ministers removed that twin factor authorisation from the original scope. Instead of that twin factor authorisation security, they have now included single factor, which is just the use of a user name and password.

Further advice provided to me in recent times highlights the extent of the security problem now confronting not only SA Health but obviously all South Australian patients in relation to the EPAS. I am firstly advised that, whilst unpublicised, there have been recent phishing attacks that have resulted in several clinical email accounts being compromised within SA Health. Let's be clear on what that is: clever IT operators have been able to penetrate the security of the clinical email accounts, so I am advised, within SA Health, and a number of those clinical email accounts have been compromised.

The advice I have been given is that EPAS, as a result of this removal of twin factor authorisation security, will now be vulnerable to such a phishing attack and, this time, the hackers or the clever IT operators could potentially access all SA state medical health records. The consequences of that are devastating and should be apparent to all who follow security and ICT issues within the health environment. My understanding is that there is already a high-level discussion going on between SA Health and Treasury in relation to this unacceptable exposure to a successful phishing attack and that an explanation is being sought as to who made the decision to remove the level of security that was originally required for all our clinical records within our hospitals.

Let's be clear on that: patients entering our hospital system should be entitled to have that information restricted to not only themselves but those they authorise in terms of their family or their treating doctors and clinicians. It certainly should not be accessible to hackers or, indeed, anyone else who wants to successfully penetrate the EPAS within SA Health. My advice is that much more will be heard of this if the government and the minister persist in their current attitude to the system.

Further information has been provided to me in relation to the ongoing budget problems for EPAS. I have been provided with confidential copies of documents presented to the EPAS board meetings in recent months. In particular, I refer to a financial report on the EPAS program dated Thursday 12 September 2013. In that, I refer to a section under the title 'Total cost of ownership (TCO) program net cost'. I quote:

The total cost of ownership forecast shows a deterioration of $10.8 million against the approved budget. This reflects the estimated financial impact of a 44-week delay ($33.3 million) offset by setting aside of $22.5 million in delayed base contingencies to meet the first 30 weeks of delay. The use of contingencies to cover 30 weeks of the delay was put to the minister as part of the approval of the revised program activation and timetable. Formal access to the contingencies has not yet been sought as additional program costs and the loss of benefits occur primarily in the 2014-15 financial year.

I quote that deliberately because this confidential document quite clearly says, 'The use of contingencies to cover 30 weeks of the delay was put to the minister,' that is, minister Snelling, 'as part of the approval of the revised program activation'. Yet we have minister Snelling, whenever questions are put to him, indicating that the project is on time and on budget or denying that he has had access to this sort of detailed information.

This particular document was leaked deliberately to highlight the inaccuracy, or the untruthfulness, of the public claims being made by minister Snelling on this issue. It is clear that there are people within both Treasury and SA Health who are concerned at minister Snelling's handling of this issue but, in particular, his public statements and the accuracy or otherwise of the public statements he has been making on this issue.

I also refer to a confidential EPAS program board report, reported to the EPAS board, dated August 2013. This is a long document and I only want to quote from two sections of it. Under the resourcing section, it makes clear that, as at the end of August 2013, a total of 220.96 full-time equivalents were working on the EPAS program. This was an increase since July of 3.2 full-time equivalents. The mix of that was 146.46 SA Health staff and 74.5 contractors.

A third of the people working on this particular project were contractors. We are talking about a single IT project which, as of August, had 221 full-time equivalent staff working on the project. That is why every month of deliberate delay by minister Snelling to try to put this issue beyond the state election is burning about $3 million a month. The minister, as I said, is trying to hide all this until after the March election.

The second part of this confidential report, issued as at 27 August 2013, addresses the issue of the claimed benefits through the removal of legacy systems as an offset to the costs. Under the heading of 'Poor communication of EPAS benefits and implementation progress', I note, and this is an update as of 20 June 2013:

Meeting held with the CIO and eHealth program director to agree structure and template for the development of an EPAS benefits realisation plan. This format will be applied to all eHealth programs. In the meantime, letters have been issued to chief executive officers of the local health networks advising them of their offsets to be realised by the financial year. This was supplemented by a meeting held with CEOs of the LHNs on 20/6/2013 to discuss intent of letters. It was agreed at the meeting that P. Zervas to schedule a meeting with each CEO LHN and their respective COOs to review detail of offsets. Timing: assumptions that were made in 2011 as part of the business case and identify gaps with the proposed resolution plan. All systems to be decommissioned will also be discussed. The outcome of these discussions will be built into the EPAS benefits realisation plan and a sign-off of the plan will occur. In the meantime, 2012-13 benefits have been realised.

The reason I quote that comment, and there are many others in this report, is to highlight the issue I mentioned two weeks ago. In the business case, the claimed benefits were that the legacy systems would be decommissioned and that the staff working with those legacy systems would be saved, and that would be a net offsetting benefit to the cost of the implementation of EPAS.

The LHNs were saying to SA Health, 'Well, look, some of those staff that you assumed in your business case to be removed have already gone in terms of us achieving other savings that SA Health required of us. Therefore, they are no longer available as a saving to be attributed to the EPAS project.' Of course, if that eventuates, that increases the net cost again of EPAS on the SA Health budget. So this is a very significant issue.

That document, and many other parts of that document, attest to the fact that the EPAS project administrators at least recognise it is a problem and are endeavouring to do something about it. However, there is an ongoing battle between the local health networks and the EPAS project management team in terms of achieving the claimed savings from the original business case.

The other aspects in relation to the management of EPAS that the minister really does need to respond to are, firstly, the issue of the appointment of Mr Michael Long. We put on the public record that Mr Long, who comes from Canada, we understand, is currently being paid just under $3,000 a day for his job. The minister has conceded that he was appointed as a result of an Ernst & Young review. We were told that he was originally appointed for just a six month period, until November this year but that he has agreed to stay on until February next year before he leaves.

We understand Mr Long was asked to deliver on a number of the recommendations from the Ernst & Young report. The minister should take the opportunity to put on the public record how many of the recommendations in the Ernst & Young report which were allocated to Mr Long have actually been delivered in the six-month period he has been in charge of IT within SA Health. Certainly the view of many observers is that they do not believe that he has added much value to the project for his cost of $3,000 a day.

The other issue is that EPAS has been subjected to a number of reviews. The minister has referred to a KPMG gateway review that was prepared following the 'go live' in the Noarlunga hospital, but I am told there have also been other reviews conducted separately by BearingPoint, Ernst & Young, and Mr Tom Stubbs. I place on the record a request for the minister to again indicate publicly, and to release publicly, the details of those four particular reviews and what they were recommending in terms of changes that need to be made to the management of the EPAS project.

Finally, in relation to EPAS costs, a leaked copy of other information provided to me indicates that when the total cost of ownership—that is, the TCA was calculated as part of the original EPAS business case—$44.8 million in risk-based contingencies was included. Of course, that figure of $44.8 million has been increased to just over $49 million in recent times. I am told that a total of 10 months slippage was built in to the costing originally, but that ten-month delay is going to be well and truly used up, given the estimated delays in the project already.

Turning now to other IT issues within Health, I want to refer to a number of those on which information has been provided to me. The next one I want to refer to is the Clinical Practice Support system (the CPS system), which was a nursing system designed to replace Excelcare. I am advised that that particular requirement was actually written into an enterprise bargaining agreement with the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation (ANMF) and that that system was only ever rolled out eventually—until the money ran out—in the Port Augusta and Lyell McEwin hospitals.

I am told that whilst it worked reasonably well in Port Augusta, it ran into a figurative brick wall at the Lyell McEwin, where there were very significant difficulties in terms of its usefulness to the business and to its original expectations. Eventually, even the ANMF became critical of the Clinical Practice Support system, which they had originally supported. It was meant to roll out to most hospitals, as I said, but it only ever rolled out to the two hospitals: the Port Augusta and Lyell McEwin hospitals.

I am not sure exactly how much money the government and SA Health spent on CPS. It is hard to get that information. Some have suggested that it is up to $10 million. Again, the minister should indicate how much money was spent on CPS. Does he also concede, as many have put to me, that in the end it was a significant waste of money by the government and SA Health in terms of the introduction of another IT project within health?

The next IT system which has attracted some publicity is the controversial Oracle system which was meant to replace Masterpiece. This system, as members would know, was originally meant to cost $20 million. Its cost to the budget in the end is going to be over $60 million, a blowout of $40 million on a $20 million project.

Work commenced on Oracle in 2009. I have been advised that SA Health went ahead with a very rapid implementation program, trying to implement it in July 2010. It was a very aggressive program. I am told that there were significant problems in terms of the configuration of Oracle, which created many of the problems that we have seen reported in the parliament and by the Auditor-General.

For example, ICT deals with hundreds of software vendors, so the total spend on licences might be correct, but it is extremely difficult to analyse the spend by vendors without reverting to taking out the many invoices that have to be paid each year. That design or configuration problem, together with other configuration problems, added to its lack of functionality as they attempted to rapidly implement it.

I am advised that Ernst & Young were commissioned to do a report, and again I am advised that Ernst & Young advised against going live in 2010. I am told that SA Health ignored that advice from Ernst & Young and went ahead, and we have therefore seen the three years of problems with Oracle. I am also told that there were very many warnings through the IC steering committee to the chief executive of Health—I assume also to the minister, although I am not definitively clear on that—that there were major problems with going live as quickly as they were suggesting, but all of those warnings were ignored in terms of SA Health's management of the project.

Members of the Legislative Council will know that today when we debated the late payment of bills legislation we were told that the government was going to pay interest on all late payment of bills for all government departments and agencies except for one department. Surprise, surprise, that one department was the worst performing department of the lot, that is SA Health. We put the question to the minister and to the government, 'Well, if SA Health is the worst performing agency in terms of paying its bills, why would you excuse it from the late payment of bills legislation?'

The minister's response was extraordinary. It was, 'Well, look, SA Health is still trying to implement the Oracle system, and it is possibly not going to be until 2015 that Oracle will be implemented, and it will only be when Oracle is finally implemented that we will be in a position to be able to enforce the late payment of accounts.' As I said, most departments and agencies are paying 95 per cent plus of their bills on time. In SA Health the number is about 70 to 75 per cent. It is an extraordinary difference.

What we are being told today is that Oracle will not be fully implemented until 2015. It started in 2009, so we have a six to seven-year implementation time frame for what was meant to be a $20 million IT project in Health, a further indication of the incompetence or negligence of ministers of health, minister Hill and minister Snelling, and chief executives of the SA Health department.

The last one in relation to these particular projects is that I have been further advised that about a year ago—or more than a year ago now—a tender was released for e-program management office services. Given that there are over $0.5 billion worth of IT projects running within the health department, this is obviously a pretty important tender. The importance of proper governance and controls is obviously a critical issue. It was identified more than 12 months ago. People are asking me what is the current status of this tender and why it has taken so long to appoint someone to implement it. Again, that is a question that can only be answered by the Minister for Health and Ageing or the chief executive officer for SA Health.

Finally, I want to turn to the significant probity issues within SA Health in relation to its management of some of these ICT programs. The first one I want to turn to is in relation to the procurement tasks for desktop services. I gave some brief detail two weeks ago about this, but there has been no response, so I intend to place some more detail on the public record.

As I said the last time, I am advised that SA Health has some 30,000 desktops or laptops and other peripherals, and about every nine months or so they go for an RFQ (a request for quotation). As a result of the most recent process, a number of multinational companies have been placed on a panel, as successful members of the panel in terms of providing that sort of equipment or service to SA Health. One of those companies is HP, and I am told that SA Health has just employed an individual from HP, who at this stage I will not name, to manage procurement tasks for desktop services within SA Health.

Let me paint the picture: HP is currently a supplier of desktop services to SA Health, yet one of their employees, or a contractor for them, is on a six-month contract, filling in a senior position in this area within SA Health. This person, in their role, has access, I am told, to all the competitor pricing for those companies that compete with HP in the marketplace on a rolling basis. This person, I am told also, or that position, has access to other commercially sensitive information. I am told that HP are charging SA Health $90,000 for three months, or $180,000 for the six-month contract period, for this particular person's services.

I am further advised that Mr Rob Smith was the acting senior manager of desktop services, and that a number of the senior managers reporting to him have raised their concerns with him and other senior management about this perception of a conflict of interest that I have just identified. I am told that, in all of those cases, their concerns have been ignored.

There are significant issues in relation to this. I raised the issues two weeks ago, and the minister has chosen not to put anything on the public record in terms of an explanation or a response. Given that it would appear that SA Health is also not responding to other probity issues that I have raised in a satisfactory way through the Budget and Finance Committee, the only opportunity to raise these issues is to put them on the public record in the parliament.

Another issue in relation to HP, which I put on the record in terms of a question to the minister, is whether or not it is true that HP overcharged SA Health more than $250,000 in 2012-13 for infrastructure services. If that is true, is it correct that that issue was identified to senior managers in SA Health, and is it correct that SA Health have done nothing to recoup the more than $250,000 in overcharging in that particular area of infrastructure services?

I am the first to acknowledge that issues of claims of overcharging can be vigorously disputed, and I place on the record that I make no judgement, at this stage, as to the accuracy or otherwise of the concerns. The fact that the minister and the CEO continue to ignore and deny many of the issues that I have raised in relation to IT does not give me much confidence in terms of what they are saying and what they are doing, but I do accept that claims of overcharging can be vigorously disputed and may be able to be convincingly rebutted by HP. I want to place that on the record, but the issue needs to be resolved by the minister and/or the chief executive of SA Health as to whether or not this claim is being raised by senior officers within SA Health. If they are, what is SA Health doing to resolve the issue with this company?

The second probity issue, again, I touched on in my earlier contribution, and that relates to the ESMI contract. The allegation in this particular area is that a contractor to SA Health has provided inside information to a senior officer of one of the tendering companies for the ESMI project during the tendering process. The allegation extends to the fact that this contractor to SA Health who was associated with the tendering process is a close personal friend of the senior officer of this particular company and that, during the tendering process, the senior officer in this tendering company was being given information or coaching from the contractor within SA Health.

In particular, I place on the record the claim that has been put to me that there is a text from the contractor associated with the ESMI tender within SA Health to the senior manager of this tendering company in the early stages of the project saying that their particular tender was 'not on the radar'. That is the advice to the tendering company and it is, so it is claimed, in a text, so the claim should be able to be easily checked—the claim 'not on the radar', an indication that that tendering company, if it wanted to be successful in that bid, needed to obviously sharpen its pencil in terms of its tender.

This is a serious claim. I am told that a probity complaint has been lodged with Ms Kate Phillips, the probity director of the ESMI project. I am told that there are copies of text messages from this senior officer in the tendering company to four other individuals, who all received copies of the original text and who were also told that they had been advised that they were 'not on the radar' and that they now needed to sharpen their pencils and get on with trying to win the ESMI project. I raised questions about this in a general way with the CEO of SA Health. Questions have been raised with the Minister for Health, and everyone denies any knowledge of the fact that there is even a probity complaint.

I have been provided with much more information in relation to that bid, and I have been provided with much more information about the ESMI project. For example, I understand the project manager has recently resigned. I am told that a senior technical lead person was dismissed and marched out the door. I am told that most of the ESMI team has now gone in terms of the management of the project within SA Health and that it is a walking disaster area at the moment within SA Health, as described to me by one observer of the management of the ESMI project.

As I said, we also have these serious claims in relation to the probity issues of that particular project but, having raised the issues, clearly at this stage the minister and the chief executive are all trying to indicate that they know nothing about it.

I also place on the record that at a much earlier stage, I have copies of a number of letters, but one I refer to in particular is dated 8 July 2011, from a company called Central Data Networks to minister Hill complaining about the tendering process for ESMI back in July 2011. I will not quote all of it, but this letter says:

I wrote to you on 8 June and I haven't yet received a response...

This was now 8 July:

Since the date of that correspondence, we have learnt of the following disturbing information. The three shortlisted vendors are...

They list the vendors, and go on to state:

Within only 10 days of the tender closing, these vendors would have requested repair for technical discussions two weeks later. As the vendor responses consisted of nine copies of very detailed response documents, these could not have been read in detail in this timeframe. It is considered that this shortlist was already predetermined prior to submissions being received.

Further evidence was in the form of requests for additional clarifying information, all of which had already been provided in the tender responses. This further reinforces the belief that the tender shortlist was predetermined. The tender process required only software costs to be presented with the daily rate for installation. As the installation effort will vary significantly between vendors, this is by no means a fair comparison and will result in uncompetitively high costs to SA Health.

Shortlisted proposals are costed between $12 million and $20 million for software alone. Our company's bid was $5 million, fully compliant, and yet it was not shortlisted. Once hardware and installation services are added, the final solutions will be $30-$40 million. We do not believe the SA government is expecting this size of expenditure, and CDM, being an Australian company, can complete the project for less than $10 million yet our company is not being considered.

It then goes on to claim what the New South Wales government has done in relation to one of the vendors which is on the shortlist, and I will not go into that detail. They then go on to say:

We understand the evaluation team attended visits to overseas installations, yet the shortlisted vendors all claim to have their latest software already running in Australian sites. As these include Flinders Medical Centre and Royal Adelaide Hospital, we wonder why there was a need for overseas site visits unless it was to avoid exposing the evaluation team to the failures in one particular state, for instance.

We consider that these issues are clearly deficiencies in the tender process and the process, and we repeat our request that the statewide imaging tender should be urgently halted and a thorough examination be undertaken.

I have been provided with a number of other letters which also make claims in relation to the management of that particular process and probity issues. I hasten to say that, again, I am not privy to all the details of the costings of the competitive tenders and bids. I do not sign off on those particular costing figures, because they are the claims of an unsuccessful bidder.

I recognise that, but there are a number of other issues that that unsuccessful bidder has raised, and the fact that, subsequently in the same process, other significant probity issues have been raised about the same process. There have also been concerns about overseas visits to look at sites when they could have visited locally and the cost of that to SA Health.

Issues raised in relation to the long-term ongoing costs of the project as opposed to the upfront costs are all issues which need to be addressed by the minister or the chief executive. One of the concerns from one of these people complaining to me is that they noted the question I put to the chief executive (Mr Swan) at the Budget and Finance Committee. I said:

Can I also ask you about ESMI. You referred to the medical imaging project before. Similarly, can I ask whether any concerns have been raised with the probity director Kate Phillips in relation to the ESMI project?

Mr SWAN: I would have to take that on notice. I am not aware of any.

This is in September 2013. The letter I have referred to dates back two years to July 2011. When we put questions to minister Snelling in the House of Assembly in the past couple of weeks about probity issues and probity concerns raised about ESMI and EPLIS, the minister indicated that he had no knowledge and would have to go off and check in relation to those claims. One of the questions was:

Has SA Health advised the minister that Ms Kate Phillips, who is also the probity director for the medical imaging IT project ESMI, has received a complaint about the probity of the ESMI project?

Mr Snelling's response:

Likewise, not that I am aware. I have not been advised of any...complaints that I recall, but I am happy to check my records.

When he was asked about whether there had been any complaints about the probity of the EPLIS project: 'Not that I am aware, but I will check my records.' The standard response from minister Snelling and Mr Swann appears to be, 'Not that I am aware, I will need to check my records,' but of course, no-one ever gets back in terms of ever having checked their records. They must have the most inefficient record-keeping system in Christendom.

No-one ever gets back after having checked their records as to whether or not there is a record of a probity complaint being lodged with Ms Kate Phillips. That is the frustration that some of these people have. We are always told that there are these probity processes that people can go through in relation to it. This company or one of these companies has lodged a probity issue back in 2011 and has heard nothing, and then sees the chief executive of the department in 2013 asked about it and he says that he is not even aware. It is fair enough if they say, 'Look, there was one, we have investigated it and we have dismissed it,' but they do not even want to concede that on the record, because that may well raise the level of concern perhaps in the media and elsewhere about the probity issues within the department.

I have so many other complaints in relation to the probity and cost issues of IT projects; time tonight just will not allow me to go through the rest of them. The reason for placing at some detail all of that information about the probity concerns, the blow-outs, the mismanagement and the negligence is, as I said, as a result of frustration at not getting answers either through Budget and Finance or through the House of Assembly question time.

The heat is now on Mr Snelling and his department in the period leading up to the election. We intend to make this a focus. I would hope they will not be allowed to hide these issues. We would hope that, if not through the parliament but through the media, pressure can be placed on minister Snelling and the department to provide some answers to the very many questions that whistleblowers and insiders in Treasury, in SA Health, in industries and companies that do business with SA Health, contractors who have worked with SA Health, and many others who have spoken to me on these issues. They are all demanding answers, and the buck stops on minister Snelling's desk.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. Carmel Zollo.

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