TOM RICHARDSON: After the hard budget comes the hard sell.
Although, come to that, Jay Weatherill hasn’t been trying all that hard.
Besides the obligatory round of radio chats, he’s kept a pretty low profile for a guy who perversely hopes handing down the state’s biggest ever deficit will somehow make him more electable.
Indeed, his entire spin for the ensuing week appears to have been borrowed from yours truly, and others who mounted a similar argument last weekend, that the Liberal Opposition should put its money where its mouth is and seriously enter the policy fray.
Steven Marshall once again dipped his toe in the water, with a commitment to scrap the Government’s ill-explained Community Safety Directorate — a project that not even Police Commissioner Gary Burns seems to understand — but it’s still really nickels and dimes stuff.
A pittance compared with the $3 billion a year it costs to deliver health services, for example.
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And, if publicity can conceivably be any small measure of achievement, it wouldn’t appear to be money well spent.
"Health is a sprawling behemoth, an iceberg department, of which patients only see the tip, the frontline administration, little suspecting the massive bureaucratic base that underpins it."
The Health portfolio is a bit of a shambles. Doctors continue to publicly rail against the new Royal Adelaide Hospital, arguing it is architecturally flawed and not big enough to meet the burgeoning needs of an ageing population. The consortium building it is at war with the Government, seeking taxpayer-funded remuneration for site remediation, with no-one able or willing to put a dollar figure on the demand. Meanwhile, the old RAH site, once promised for a city hub or a green space, demands so much remediation of its own, nobody’s really sure just how it’s going to end up, or when. It seems more inclined to end up as a sort of medical-themed Le Cornu site, a vast wasteland of overzealous spin and broken dreams.
All of these little treats lie in wait for taxpayers in years to come, thanks to Labor’s propensity to overpromise and chase headlines.
But the headlines the health system is garnering now must fill the Government with dread (tinged, perhaps, with relief that the March election won’t fall in a period of peak demand for services). Patients crammed into corridors in the RAH, ambulance ramping at Flinders, northern health authorities seeking the closure of Modbury Hospital’s in-patient pediatric unit.
These are not signs of a health system in rude health.
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Commanding as it does the single biggest outlay of any Government department, Health is a sprawling behemoth, an iceberg department, of which patients only see the tip, the frontline administration, little suspecting the massive bureaucratic base that underpins it.
In recent years it appears to have been run more politically than strategically, eschewing difficult savings (we will call them savings, rather than cuts, for despite them the sector’s budget continues to grow) but moreover sparing the axe to salvage publicity rather than public health outcomes.
In the light of this, it’s not certain Snelling was the most inspired appointment for this most difficult of roles, given his form as Treasurer of kowtowing to interest groups and leaving difficult and controversial decisions for the Post-Election World. Having said that, who on the Labor benches could do it better? Quite.
This is why the Opposition’s risk-averse strategy is so galling. In this climate more than ever, we actually need Government not for headlines but for outcomes.
The best advice from the brightest minds in the Liberal Party is that Steven Marshall should hold fire on policy until October, and no doubt he will. He might, perhaps, announce the odd think tank here and there, or commit to cutting nickel and dime programs that few have heard of and those that do don’t understand.
These are not the big problems facing SA’s next Government, whatever its colour. Those problems will involve grappling with constrained recurrent spending while delivering quality services – as opposed to the existing situation where recurrent spending increases while service delivery goes backwards.
Given that the art of state government is effectively striking an electorally-palatable balance between fiscal discipline and acceptable public services, this debate is as big and bold as it gets at this middling political tier.
The Liberals’ fanciful catch-cry that solutions will not present themselves until the mid-year budget review is a political strategy, designed to buy some time. It was the mantra of Isobel Redmond, whose residual political goodwill could not buy herself enough time. She couldn’t hold on long enough to present an alternative version. Marshall can’t afford to wait that long either. And neither, moreover, can South Australia.
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