Mr PEDERICK (Hammond) (20:19): I rise to make a few comments in regard to the Supply Bill 2021 and note that the amount of money we are authorising so we can write the cheques for the Public Service and others is $6,161,000,000. That gives assent for enough finance to get us through until we have the Appropriation Bill debate and all the debate around it. We have based this figure on the actual appropriations that were required for the first four months of the 2020-21 financial year. The passage of the bill is essential to enable the operations of government to be paid for the period 1 July 2021 until the Appropriation Bill is approved.

I am really proud to be part of the Marshall Liberal government, looking at the funding we are spending right across the state, right throughout our regions and also through the urban areas. What makes me really proud is that we are spending money in areas that those on the other side absolutely neglect, and that is the regions. Some would say that in some ways we are not particularly tactical, I guess, but I think it is tactical because we spend it whether it is in a Liberal electorate, whether it is in a Labor electorate, whether it is in a marginal electorate, whether it is in a crossbencher's seat or whether it is in a safe electorate, and it is all up to perception whether you think a seat is safe or not. I never take that view.

I reflect on the $1.3 billion we are spending on the year 7 upgrade into secondary school, coming into next year, and I look at where we are spending $100 million on a new school in Whyalla—a seat we will probably never win, to be frank, but the new school is needed there. I also want to acknowledge the $20 million we are spending at Murray Bridge High School, a great boon for doing major upgrades to some of the tech facilities, upgrading the gym and getting in those extra classrooms in so that we can have year 7 come in for secondary classes.

We will soon be spending $5 million at the Murray Bridge North primary school, and when I went to Meningie on Sunday for a meeting it was good to see the work that has been done in previous years to the Meningie school. With the member for MacKillop, I assisted in getting the funding to get that project finished; it was about $700,000 short.

One project in education and I am really proud of, one that took a lot of work, because the Mallee has swung in and out of Hammond and into Chaffey in the past, was the at least six-year battle to get a swimming pool built for the Karoonda school—and not just for the school but for the community. That was a long, drawn-out process, and I want to acknowledge the work the member for Chaffey, Tim Whetstone, did in this regard as well in lobbying for that new four-lane swimming pool. There were swimming lessons conducted at the pool, and they are just fixing up some of the fencing around it. Hopefully, we can have the official launch of that very soon.

I want to acknowledge the work we have been doing in health, spending money on health. We have the proposed Women's and Children's Hospital, the new build that will come, but in the meantime we are spending $50 million on the current Women's and Children's Hospital to keep it up to speed for the years we need to keep it in really good working order to look after the women and children of this state.

I also want to talk about something else we have done in health that I am really proud of, and that is reactivating the Repatriation Hospital at Daw Park. Labor made a decision to close that hospital. What a faux pas that was. It was gifted to the state by the commonwealth, and that is exactly what it was: a repatriation hospital for returned service men and women.

My brother is a returned serviceman. He served for 23 years in Rwanda, which is a difficult action. He was peacekeeping with the Hutus and Tutsis and he witnessed some terrible massacres. He was peacekeeping and was upgraded to war service 13 years later, and then he served in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. So I feel it keenly, along with many of my family, including uncles and a great uncle who served in World War I and World War II. My father served home here in the Citizens Military Forces. With regard to reactivating the Repat, some of the things we have done include:

step-down transitional accommodation to support people with brain injury and spinal cord injury transition from acute rehabilitation back into the community;

a dementia care village in partnership with HammondCare;

an 18-bed neurobehavioural unit for people whose behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia mean their needs cannot be met in mainstream residential care;

a 12-bed specialist advanced dementia unit for people living with advanced dementia;

a 26-bed care transition facility for people transitioning to home or an aged-care facility following acute care treatment;

a 24-bed brain injury rehabilitation and a 24-bed spinal cord injury rehabilitation facility;

a veterans' wellbeing centre to provide services and support for veterans and their families;

a town square community hub and an open outdoor flexible space, including a new wheelchair sports stadium;

a new home for the Southern Older Persons Community Mental Health Service;

a new facility for the Statewide Eating Disorder Service, including a residential facility;

reopened the hydrotherapy pool; and

the securing of 40 beds already operating—20 beds in the rehabilitation building (to be relocated to a new 26-bed transition care facility) and 20 beds in the ViTA precinct.

We are also making sure that the chapel, the remembrance gardens, the museum and the SPF Hall will be protected and preserved as community assets for future generations. I think that is a real win for the people of South Australia and certainly for the veterans of South Australia and the community.

We are also doing things in health. I was really proud to team up with the health minister before Christmas to open the new emergency department in Murray Bridge. This is a $7 million promise we took to the election. It has opened up a whole new way to deal with emergency in Murray Bridge, where the old facilities had not been updated for about 40 years. There were beds with just a curtain between them. Of course, the real issue was security if patients were having some sort of psychological episode. We have many more treatment rooms. We have rooms for families and rooms for doctors to meet with patients and families. There are also resuscitation rooms.

This is a great bonus not just for Murray Bridge but also for the surrounding area right out to the Victorian border and down into the South-East and north of Murray Bridge and even towards the Hills and Mount Barker. I am really proud of that. Alongside that, $3 million was spent on new X-ray facilities at the Murray Bridge Soldiers' Memorial Hospital.

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to see the upgrades at the aged-care facility in Strathalbyn. With the redistribution, Strathalbyn is coming into Hammond. I looked after Strathalbyn in the 2006-2010 period when I was first elected. I am very much hoping that I get the privilege to look after Strathalbyn again after the next election on 19 March next year. It is fantastic to see close on $20 million being spent there on aged-care work, where there will be 12 new dementia beds.

Certainly in the planning it was really good to see that the new catering, kitchen and dining facility could be factored in because that needed to go in underneath the upstairs rooms. It would have been more than a problem to try and backfill that space and that build would have cost a lot more, so it was good to see that happening.

I note the Kalimna Hostel site—which is on land that was donated by the community and the building was donated by the community—is going out for expressions of interest soon to ensure that we get the best use for the community. Toward the end of its previous life, it was used for aged care and sadly the former Labor government decided to shut it down and farm people out all over the Hills and Fleurieu. These were people in their homes, in the last months and days of their lives and their lives were totally disrupted. It was shameful what happened, so we will see a great outcome there in the Strathalbyn area.

In other work that we are doing with the $16.7 billion infrastructure build right across the state, there are the South Road roadworks that are going on, with billions of dollars being spent there, and as we get towards the really sticky bit of that with the combination of a couple of tunnels and aboveground works to help complete that.

I acknowledge Bow Hill Engineering for the work they keep doing with overpasses. They built half the overpasses at Darlington. They are a little company that employs up to 40 people out there at Bow Hill and they keep expanding their working area so they can build these great sections up over 60 metres long to transport through to Adelaide, or anywhere else for that matter, for those projects.

A couple of roads that link my electorate through to Chaffey and MacKillop, the Browns Well Highway which goes from Pinnaroo to Loxton, and the Ngarkat Highway which goes from Pinnaroo down to Bordertown were two of the eight roads we promised to bring back to 110 km/h at the last election. As was pointed out earlier today, as the surfaces got worse or road widening needed to be done, the previous Labor government decided that it was easier just to pull the signs back to 100 km/h and not worry about it.

I am so proud to see that out of the $72 million for those eight roads, $37 million was attributed to those two roads. They are each about 100 kilometres long, and shoulder sealing was done each side all the way. There were certainly sections of pavement rehabilitation which meant the road was obviously ripped up and relaid over several kilometres on each road. Some barrier work was done with safety barriers put in as well. It is a real game changer out there.

I know the Browns Well Highway is not far off being reposted back to 110 km/h. This is absolutely vital in the freight route work that has happened in recent years where these roads are now road train rated, that is two trailer road train rated, and so the B-triples, the B-quads, the road trains and the AB-doubles can go up these roads.

Alongside that initial $37 million for these two roads, $5 million more had to be found with some of the work on this road rehabilitation process and I am really glad that happened. This will be a real boon for the Mallee where we see Parilla potatoes. We helped them with a regional grant, putting in $2 million for their $35 million build, building their new packing shed.

Parilla potatoes and the Pye family—Mark and Fiona and Renee and the team—are going through the process of putting houses into Lameroo and Pinnaroo so they can relocate workers and hire other workers and really invigorate the Mallee towns and the community, and save that freight to Virginia then back again. They can utilise those two roads I previously mentioned to get their product out to market, whether it is heading to Sydney, Melbourne or elsewhere.

Certainly, there has been a lot of discussion about roadworks, and I acknowledge the work we have been doing on the Dukes Highway, the Princes Highway and the entrance coming into Adelaide as you come down the freeway. Since it was opened up as a three-lane road about 20 years ago, coming down past Mount Osmond to the lights at Cross Road and Portrush Road, it has not been repaved. We have seen it is getting repaved. There is still some work to be done there.

Sadly, there have been some hold-ups with some accidents and people get a bit excited. I live on the Dukes Highway and, sadly, we have fatal accidents out there and it can shut down a road for 12 hours. You wake up and you cannot hear the semitrailers going past and you think that something has happened. Trucks get rerouted and that kind of thing.

I want to pay my respects to David Diprose, who sadly was the motorcyclist killed on the freeway the other night. He was a mentor for my son, Mack, at Peats Soil, working for Peter Wadewitz. I pay my condolences to the family. It was a bit of a freak accident. We do not know the full story, but I pay my condolences to everyone who knew David and his family.

People talk about access to Adelaide with freight. We have to acknowledge that there is a freight route around Adelaide around Portrush Road. We did some work with GlobeLink. It did not add up financially. Some people quoted it at $7 billion to put four lanes of roads around Adelaide to the north and a railway line and then an airport out at Monarto. It is all good on paper, but it needs to be funded.

Because we now have these new freight combinations and we are getting more heavy freight, as I indicated earlier, anything above a B-double, such as a B-triple or a B-quad or a road train or an AB-double, has to go around the Sturt Highway. There is a turn-off north of Sedan, the Halfway House Road. We put money in there with the federal government—I think it was $12 million or $14 million—to get that bypass back down towards Sedan, Mannum and Murray Bridge through the overdimension route and get them on their way heading south, because legally they cannot go down the freeway. That is alleviating some of the freight task with that heavy freight coming down the hill into Adelaide.

I acknowledge that more work needs to be done, but we must acknowledge that thousands and thousands of tonnes of freight gets transported around this state all the time. I must admit it is record road funding that we are spending in this state. I also look at what we are spending at the Port Wakefield overpass: about $120 million. We have the Joy Baluch second bridge being built at Port Augusta and other roadworks are being contributed to right across the state. The Horrocks Highway is getting some work on the way to Clare. That is certainly good to see and is certainly much needed after years of inaction.

I want to commend what we are doing as a government in the regions. More work needs to be done and we are certainly getting some massive funding boosts around the place. I see the spin-offs with that billion dollars worth of infrastructure that is being built close to Murray Bridge. We have Thomas Foods, with their $300 million to $400 million meatworks, which is getting underway, and we have helped contribute to that with some community road funding. We have a $300 million solar farm waiting in the wings. We have the Bridgeport Hotel, a $45 million development. Ingham's keeps spending millions of dollars on top of their $50 million feed mill. Costa have doubled their mushroom plant at $90 million.

It is so good to see so much investment in the regions. One thing we need to tackle is the housing issue, but we will get to that. I commend the Supply Bill and wish its speedy passage through the house.