Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Primary Healthcare) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to congratulate the member for Bennelong on an excellent first speech. I would like to begin by thanking voters in the electorate of Boothby for the privilege of representing them for a sixth term in parliament. As we know, the last election was the closest election since 1940 and the electorate of Boothby was one of the three closest seats. So it was an electorate in which everyone’s vote really did count.

I would like to thank my hardworking electorate office staff. I would also like to thank the hundreds of volunteers for the Liberal Party. I would like to thank especially the Boothby federal electorate committee: Fran Southern, who was an effective, hardworking president, and Janet Hillgrove, who coordinated many things during the campaign and has been over a very long time a tremendous volunteer for the Liberal Party. I would also like to thank the state and federal secretariats and the state director, Bev Barber, and her team for their timely and welcome assistance during the campaign.

The electorate of Boothby is a tremendous electorate to represent. We have many outstanding institutions. The Waite Research Institute, one of the top agricultural research institutes anywhere in the world, represents what Michael Porter has described as a real ‘cluster’. We have the University of Adelaide agricultural science course, the CSIRO and the Wine Research Institute and we also have some new facilities: the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics and now a plant accelerator. It has been with tremendous pride as the local member that I have seen this outstanding organisation continue to grow. We have people from all over the world coming to work at the Waite institute.

We also have many great institutions, including Flinders University, Flinders Medical Centre and Daw Park Repatriation Hospital. I cannot let the opportunity go past, but many people may have heard the previous Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, talking about local hospital networks. If he said it once, he said it a thousand times: ‘We’re going to have hospitals funded nationally, run locally.’ To give a little bit of background: in South Australia we had a generational health review. We moved to three local health services: the Southern Adelaide Health Service, which was Flinders Repat and Noarlunga; a northern health service; and a north-west health service. Some years after that, the state government decided to move to two health services. Only a week after the state government signed the COAG agreement for these local hospital networks the state government made a decision to have every metropolitan hospital in the same health service. Rather than having local autonomy and local hospital boards—as the coalition would prefer—we now have every hospital in the same health service. So it shows a real disconnect between the way the federal government sees a way around national health and hospital networks, specifically their local hospital networks, and how the state government sees a way of getting around it. The idea was to have activity based funding and to reward the more efficient places. Instead, 95 per cent of the effort which occurs in the metropolitan hospitals will all be in the same health service.

A second issue which I would like to raise is adult education and adult re-entry. About 20 years ago South Australia developed adult secondary colleges. There are five in South Australia, including Hamilton Secondary College in my electorate. These colleges have continued under successive state governments, Liberal and Labor. It is fair to say that these colleges have been life transforming. They are for people who did not have a good experience at school and who left school early. They get a second chance to go back and do their year 12. It is good to have a second chance.

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