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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2019-02-26 Daily Xml
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Ambulance Ramping

The Hon. C.M. SCRIVEN (15:08): A further supplementary: what action is in that letter, if he wrote to them today?

The Hon. S.G. WADE (Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (15:08): I seek your guidance, Mr President. I could read it all out.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. S.G. WADE: It would be tempting; very tempting.

The PRESIDENT: I'm in your hands, minister. If you wish to table it you are entitled to seek leave to table the document.

The Hon. S.G. WADE: I make the point—

Members interjecting:

The Hon. S.G. WADE: Don't worry, I don't think the ANMF is not going to provide it to their friends in the Labor Party. Let's just make the point that the Marshall Liberal government has called out ramping as completely unacceptable. I appreciate the reference in the letter from the health organisations to the former Labor government.

The fact of the matter is that it was the former Labor government that brought ramping to South Australia. They allowed it to fester and develop into the norm for our hospitals, and on coming to government we committed to stamping it out and calling it out as completely unacceptable.

Now that the member has invited me to reflect, let's think about the culture of the former Labor government when it came to ramping. Ramping is not part of the normal running of a world-class health system, but it is a symptom of a system deformed by Labor's Transforming Health experiment and 16 years of Labor mismanagement. So let me tell you what one former Labor health minister said about ramping. He fundamentally—

The Hon. K.J. MAHER: Point of order, Mr President.

The PRESIDENT: Just wait, minister. Point of order.

The Hon. K.J. MAHER: We in the opposition have heeded your request to make sure answers to supplementaries in some way relate to the question that was asked, and I seek your guidance about whether answers to supplementaries similarly have to be—

The PRESIDENT: Minister, thank you for the point of order.

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order! I am making a ruling on a point of order. Can the government benchers calm down.

The Hon. T.J. Stephens: I am very excited.

The PRESIDENT: Thank you, the Hon. Mr Stephens, but I don't need to hear how excited you are. I am not upholding the point of order. The minister has some leeway. I was very generous with the supplementary, which was actually probably regarding an answer midway through, so in my generosity to the government benchers I am going to give the minister some leeway to reflect and answer.

The Hon. S.G. WADE: So the letter acknowledged the state of affairs inherited by this government, and one of the reasons was because Labor didn't care about ramping. Let me refer to a former Labor health minister who brushed off ramping as basically a fight between ambulance and emergency department staff, and said that ambulances in photos showing ramping were often empty. Labor won't acknowledge the demolition job they did on South Australia's public health system. They broke their promise to never, ever close the Repat, they broke their promise twice to upgrade The QEH, they broke their promise to the eye hospital at Modbury. This government is going to deliver on its commitment to the people of South Australia to eliminate ramping.

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