Union rage at Marshall’s Liberals cools down for Labor | David Penberthy

The passion of SA’s ambulance union on the state’s growing ramping problem appears to have shifted in the 12 months since Labor won government, writes David Penberthy.

It is almost 12 months since Peter Malinauskas was elected Premier in an unforeseen landslide, smashing the one-term government of Steven Marshall principally over the issue of hospital ramping.

The Labor victory was fuelled in large part by a protracted campaign by the South Australian Ambulance Employees Association, which did a hugely effective job of exposing the human toll of ramping on ambos, and more importantly patients.

It also did a hugely effective job of killing off the Marshall government.

One year on, it is worth asking whether the ambos’ union was more interested in helping to fix the ramping crisis, or simply helping Malinauskas and the Labor Party.

The ferocity and rage the union showed towards the Liberals is in stark contrast to its meekness and indifference to the fact that, under Labor, ramping has been vastly worse than at any time under Marshall’s rule, indeed at any time in SA history.

I am not having a crack at ambos here, obviously enough. I have a couple of great friends who are ambulance officers, and also a lot of time for the former secretary of the union Phil Palmer.

Premier Peter Malinauskas and Health Minister Chris Picton at the Women’s and Children’s Hosptial. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Naomi Jellicoe

He was a great advocate for his members and rightly identified the ramping issue during the last term of government as being completely unacceptable.

Phil was also one of the lowest-paid union leaders in SA, in a field of endeavour which can attract a surprisingly extravagant level of remuneration for people who claim to be on the side of the battlers.

I was intimately involved with one episode during Marshall’s reign which, in hindsight, ended up being 30 minutes of radio which helped kill his government.

When the ramping figures started to soar about three years ago, Phil was often in touch to share war stories from his members and to fill me on the their campaign.

These were ambos who were at the coalface dealing with genuinely unwell people whose distress was being compounded by interminable wait times to get a hospital bed.

Phil had been on the radio a few times for interviews but I said to him that if ever he wanted us to just do a series of interviews with his frontline members and go bang-bang-bang, billing them as the real human stories from the ramping crisis, that we would be all ears.

Our view was that the government was failing to respond to the problem with adequate urgency and that the real-life stories of ambulance officers would make better radio than simply another interview with a union boss.

I arranged the segment with Phil’s then organiser, Leah Watkins, who upon his retirement last year, was installed as the union chief.

The segment started after the 8am news and we had three ambos lined up, who had been organised by the union. What happened next though was that the switchboard genuinely lit up as other ambos who had not spoken to us or the union all started ringing in.

We took call after call almost up until 8.30am with all these amassed stories painting a picture of undeniable dysfunction, all told by real people who were genuine in their dismay.

Former Treasurer Rob Lucas poses with fake money before the state election. Picture: Brenton Edwards

The political backdrop to all this was terrible for the Marshall government. You had a treasurer in Rob Lucas who was being his famously parsimonious self in defying the ambos’ union calls for a pay rise, and initially refusing to cough up enough extra dough to unplug the gaps in hospitals.

You had a health minister in Stephen Wade thrashing about madly trying to fix it, offering arguments (like his Labor successor Chris Picton now) as to why change would take time, and hovering above it all, Marshall shoulder shrugging his way through the situation with an air of becalmed detachment that would ultimately cost him his job.

All this is recent history, but in a political sense, ancient history, as that government is now gone and there’s a new sheriff in town.

But boy, isn’t the new sheriff being aided by the same union which almost bankrupted itself buying chalk markers from Officeworks to turn every ambulance in the state into a mobile corflute for the ALP.

Not only is the union now silent and supine in the face if Labor’s failure thus far to honour its key promise, it has even made the extraordinary decision to snub the Liberals from meetings in protest at their performance while in power, even though Wade and Lucas have exited politics and Marshall will probably soon follow, and holds no leadership role.

Ambulances ramped at the Flinders Medical Centre in April 2022. Picture: Kelly Barnes

In a remarkable interview on the ABC this week, Watkins confirmed that she had not and would not be meeting with the Liberals about the ramping issue.

“The trust between our members and the Liberal Party is trashed,” Watkins said.

The Liberals are right to be hammering this as an issue. Promises don’t come any bigger than the one Mali made this time last year.

I know the promise was nuanced and that he said the plan during the four years of this government was to return ramping to 2018 levels. That’s not what it said on the tens of thousands of posters that covered the state, though.

The posters said: “Labor will fix ramping”.

And more damningly, at no point did Malinauskas say that, if elected, there was a pretty big chance that ramping would go up. Which it has.

The one advantage he has in defending the current state of affairs is a cat’s paw union, which overnight has gone from a dogged defender of the injured and infirm, to an industrial shrinking violet which would rather not comment about it all.

I mean, it can’t be easy running a public hospital system.

You try doing it.

Originally published as Union rage at Marshall’s Liberals cools down for Labor | David Penberthy