Annette Hurley (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I listened carefully to what Senator Bob Brown said and I should tell him that in South Australia we do have a mechanism to deal with misleading advertising. I find it very interesting that he has praised the leader of the Liberal Party, Ms Redmond, because the only occasion on which the electoral commissioner in South Australia has found ads to be misleading is in the case of Liberal Party advertising. The person Senator Bob Brown is defending as being a person of integrity is the only political leader found to have put out misleading advertising, as ruled on by the South Australian electoral commissioner.

I think the voters of South Australia, as Senator Birmingham said, do need to be aware, but they do not need to listen to him whining about a few preference issues in the Legislative Council vote. The voters of South Australia need to beware of the possibility of electing a Liberal government that is inept, that has spent its time divided and that is concentrating on internal disputes rather than on the good of South Australia.

Senator Birmingham referred to the Premier, Mike Rann, talking to his Labor Party mates in other states. Yes, Premier Mike Rann does talk to his Labor Party mates in other states. In fact, he also talks to the Labor Prime Minister here in Canberra, a move that was mirrored in a pathetic attempt by Ms Redmond last week to come to Canberra and discuss issues about water. But Ms Redmond was unable to emulate the Premier. Her visit was very largely a flop, whereas the Premier, Mike Rann, returned to South Australia with significant defence contracts and significant financial assistance with infrastructure projects—all things which ensure that South Australia is now in the best position it has been in for many decades.

South Australia certainly has a record low unemployment rate, which is something that would have been inconceivable 10 years ago. People were resigned to the fact that South Australia would be a state languishing down the bottom and that it would always have a relatively high unemployment rate. Premier Mike Rann got in and made sure that South Australia had a strategic plan which included bringing the employment rate up to the national average. He thought big, he had big plans and he went about ensuring that those plans succeeded, and they have to a very large extent. When the Rann Labor government first introduced the strategic plan, people ridiculed it and said that he would be lambasted in the end because he had set such high targets they would never be reached. Most of those targets have been reached, and we are now setting even higher targets. Premier Mike Rann and his Labor ministers have the runs on the board.

South Australian voters should beware of voting in a Liberal team—I use that word loosely—that is very unstable and that has had its hospital plan and stadium plan costings comprehensively discredited. It is an opposition that has gone around making costing promises on the basis of a $1 billion saving in the hospital plan, but that saving has been discredited. The costings are based on back-of-the-envelope calculations—from an architect who has had no experience with building hospitals—submitted to the Liberal Party. The initial costings of the plan were double what it now says they are. It is on the basis of these dodgy costings that the Liberal opposition is going around making promises.

As for stormwater, which is one of these things that they will fund on the basis of these dodgy costings, the Rann Labor government has been very concerned about water and stormwater and has built a number of stormwater storage and recovery ponds around Adelaide and the state, building on the excellent work that has been done at Salisbury over many decades. Indeed, out at Andrews Farm, I lived next door to an aquifer storage centre that was built from the Better Cities funds from the Hawke government. These stormwater retention ponds have been put in place over a large number of years, over successive governments. They have been very successful. They have been used—again, I was in the northern suburbs—to water agricultural crops, and that is their best use. They water ovals for councils, agricultural crops and the market gardens in and around the northern suburbs of Adelaide.

Whether that water is suitable for drinking is something that is still an unproven technology. The CSIRO states very clearly that more research needs to be done in this area. We have already seen what happened in Queensland when it was suggested that recycled water be used for drinking water. It was soundly rejected by the population there because people felt that adequate research had not been done. Adequate research has not been on drinking water.

We see again the Liberal opposition using those half-truths, part-statements and twisting them around to make some semblance of a policy. They talk about billions of litres of drinking water coming from that stormwater idea. This is a consistent theme. They talk about these ideas as though they are going to be implemented in the next term of government when they know, and we all know, that those plans will not be implemented in the next term of government—not the stadium, not the hospital refurbishment, not a lot of their other policies and promises, because they simply do not have the money to do it. They will have even less money when it is clear that not only is their idea for the refurbishment of the Royal Adelaide Hospital probably not physically possible but also the costings, I am sure, will prove to be completely wrong.

From my point of view, I know the election is going to be extremely tight. The Rann Labor government has been in power for two terms and people do have some feeling that governments should not be in place for too long. The Rann Labor government has suffered from that perception. Ms Redmond came to power in between two warring factions of the Liberal Party in South Australia. She has made good use of that position and she has been seen as a fresh face. The backroom people in the Liberal Party have made sure that she is not very often in the media, that her appearances are carefully scripted, that she sticks to the mantra and ignores specific questions about her policies, her costings and the validity of those costings.

The Labor Party in South Australia acknowledge that the election will be tight. They acknowledge that they cannot run on what they have achieved in the past eight years. They have put forward a series of policies to take South Australia forward into the future and build on the work that has been done in South Australia—in the mining exploration area, which is just coming to fruition, and work in the defence area. We see at the moment the building of housing and other facilities at Edinburgh to expand the number of Defence Force personnel. We see expansion out at Techport with manufacturing of defence materiel, which has wonderful spin-offs, and building on the work of DSTO in South Australia.

We have also seen a huge building of infrastructure in South Australia. The Northern Expressway is being built and the vast improvement of South Road, including an underpass, is well in train. These will have great benefits for the economy and for transport. We have already seen at Outer Harbour the dredging of the port, which has enabled Outer Harbour to keep dealing with the booming exports in our agricultural industry in South Australia, in grain and wine and so on. That was an early Labor government initiative on infrastructure that is now reaping tremendous benefits for exports from South Australia.

Not resting on its laurels, the South Australian government has continued to spend on infrastructure. This is something that we on this side of the house talked about constantly during the term of the Howard government, which was remiss in building that kind of infrastructure that would ensure continued prosperity. I was certainly very pleased during that time to be able to point to my own home state, where the Labor government was building infrastructure to ensure that we maintained our edge and built on that to go ahead for the future.

You cannot talk about infrastructure and the future without also talking about education. Again the Rann Labor government has placed a great emphasis on education in all sectors—primary, secondary and the tertiary sectors. For example, the Rann Labor government had great success in attracting tertiary institutions into South Australia, such as the Carnegie Mellon Institute, which is focussing on post-graduate opportunities, and building on the fantastic work of the tertiary institutions already in South Australia—the University of South Australia, Adelaide University, and Flinders University.

The Rann Labor government has a vision of South Australia being a state that is known for a highly skilled, educated population that is poised for future development. So the Rann Labor government has set in place the building blocks to ensure not only that that is possible but that it will happen. I am certainly very worried for my state that this good work might not continue if the Rann government is not re-elected. I think that would be a great shame. I do not see the Liberal opposition having any of that kind of vision for the future. I think they have concentrated in their policies on blocking development. They do not want a new hospital, they do not want a redevelopment of Glenside and they do not want redevelopment out at St Clair. They have concentrated on saying, ‘No, no, no. Let’s not change anything. Let’s block everything. Go for us!’ Whereas I would like to see a re-elected Rann Labor government taking risks yet again but making sure that I and my children—and, hopefully in due course, my grandchildren—have a state that we are proud to call our own.