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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-08-25 Daily Xml
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Peterborough

The Hon. J.E. HANSON (15:53): I love South Australia. Although I spend a great deal of my time here in Adelaide when I am representing the people, I like getting out to regional South Australia. One of the things that I like best about regional South Australia is the sense of history that you get out there. You get out there what has made our state, and you also get out there what has made our state great.

While you can find paintings in this place of important people sitting around an old gum tree telling you that they made the state, the fact is that when you get out to regional South Australia you can see the industries and you can see the people and the workers when they are out there creating the building blocks for what makes us what we are today.

One such town is the town of Peterborough. Fittingly, for a state of pubs and churches, one of the oldest structures in the town, and in fact I would say in South Australia, is the Peterborough Hotel, the pub. It was constructed in 1881. One year later, they constructed a primary school. In 1891, they constructed the general store and the post office. The police station, the cells and the courthouses were all completed in 1892 and a power station was created for the town in 1914. The hospital followed in 1922. The fact is that all this clearly establishes that Peterborough was a driving force for our state as a regional town, and the services underlined it as a place to be.

Much like the original town and the name of the town, in Peterborough a great deal has changed. But changing times should not make us forget what makes regional towns and those who live in them great. Services like providing local doctors to service locals in regional towns cannot be something we ignore. There is a growing crisis in regional health in South Australia.

There is one GP for roughly every 900 people in Adelaide, in a town like Peterborough it is one GP for every 3,000 people. Locals can wait months for an appointment. Of the 60 training rural GP positions, only roughly 20 of these are actually filled. Peterborough's local GP clinic itself is on life support. It faces closure in February next year due to doctor shortages. This situation is desperate.

A survey of rural doctors done by the Rural Doctors Association of SA found that 77 per cent of doctors say the number of doctors is below critical mass. These numbers are simply alarming. Peterborough residents who have contacted me are genuinely concerned about what the closure of the GP clinic will mean for their town. They know all too well that a regional service lost is a regional service often lost forever. They do not want to see their local GP services in Peterborough be a thing of the past. They are deeply concerned, and they should be.

It is part of the reason why an elected Malinauskas Labor government will invest $662 million in fixing health, with at least—at least—$100 million in regional country health. Sadly, it seems the Marshall Liberal government is not concerned. After three long years of suffering, a long-awaited meeting between the Liberal government and local GP representatives was cancelled at the last minute—cancelled just last week on Thursday. This is exactly the kind of action that makes the Rural Doctors Association's claim that SA country doctors are being left out on a limb by SA Health ring so very true. That limb is so very close to snapping.

If the GP clinic in Peterborough is allowed to close by a government that can find $660 million to build a new basketball stadium in Adelaide, it will stand as a testament to the modern Liberal Party's failed values. For a party that claimed regions matter and a Liberal leader who promised he would fix country health services, the closure of the Peterborough clinic will expose this as yet another broken promise to the regions.

Such broken promises sit awfully nicely next to their broken promises on no more privatisation, protecting our water and failed savings on power bills. For Peterborough—a town, as I have said, that has so much history laden all over its streets—it will certainly not be forgotten.

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