With a 'direct ear' to the treasurer, have police outranked paramedics as the SA government's top priority?

Australia Broadcast Center

a day ago

"Having the direct ear of the treasurer certainly is an advantage for me as a chief executive and it's my job to make sure I exploit that."
One day after the South Australian government handed down a budget with law and order as its centrepiece, SA Police Commissioner Grant Stevens smiled as he summed up the fortuitous position he finds himself in, just nine months out from the next state election.
"It's one of those few occasions where we have a senior cabinet minister as the minister for police," he told reporters.
"I'm grateful for that level of focus that the government is putting on law and order and policing in South Australia."
Mr Stevens was referring to Stephen Mullighan — a long-serving Labor cabinet minister who happens to not only be police minister, but treasurer too.
Having a cabinet boss who is also in charge of government spending gives Mr Stevens a unique opportunity to wield influence, and the latest state budget could be seen as a case in point.
Hundreds of millions of dollars for more police officers, firearms and infrastructure formed part of what Mr Mullighan described as "the largest boost to police funding in the state's history".
As ABC News previously noted, there was no mistaking the budget message the government was trying to send, with photos of police officers splashed across the budget papers and projected onto screens around the budget lock-up room.
But turn the clock back three years, and the government was keen to spruik a different kind of frontline worker, whose presence was keenly felt at the last state election, and whose absence from the latest budget front-page raises questions about the government's priorities going forward.
"Labor will fix the ramping crisis."
It was an election mandate that brought the party to government in March 2022, and which has since become an annoying itch for MPs forced to defend the government's progress.
When the Malinauskas government handed down its first budget in June 2022, a photo of a nurse, paramedic and doctor graced the front-page — a nod to the $2.4 billion in health spending budgeted that year.
But in 2025, ramping remains high.
Ambulances spent 3,700 hours waiting outside emergency departments in April, a decrease on the month before but still much higher than the worst month under the previous government.
Despite the government's latest budget tipping an additional $1.9 billion into the health system over the next five years — $1.7 billion of which is just to address increasing demand — health unions were not too pleased.
"This budget is strong on crime but soft on health," Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation CEO Elizabeth Dabars said.
"We know that they've put additional investment into health, but the reality is that the demands in the system on nurses and midwives are far too great to endure."
Paramedics were equally scathing.
"It is inconceivable that we are nine months out from the next election, and the government that promised our community that it would fix the ramping crisis, has not budgeted for any additional ambulance resourcing, or to address ramping and response times," Ambulance Employees Association general secretary Paul Ekkelboom said.
"The best this government can do is reframe the narrative away from ramping, and abandon on its commitments to the people of South Australia."
But Premier Peter Malinauskas said health remained one of the government's top priorities, and budgeted spending on health eclipsed spending on police.
"Let's take nurses for instance: We committed at the last election that we would employ an extra 300 nurses. We've smashed those numbers out of the park by the tune of many, many hundreds," he told ABC News Stateline.
"Similarly with doctors, we said we'd employ an extra 100 doctors into our system over the life of our time in government. Last year alone, we increased it by over 300 over and above attrition."
When questioned on his progress on "fixing the ramping crisis", Mr Malinauskas pointed to ambulance response times.
"They're rolling up to triple-0 calls on time and that is the difference between life and death," he said.
"We have made inroads (in fixing the ramping crisis), notwithstanding the fact that clearly, we still would like to see ramping improve.
"As those new beds come online that we've invested in so heavily and quite dramatically — and there are hundreds coming online over the next couple of years — we hope it improves."
So, if health is still a priority for the government, what has prompted it to deliver a budget so heavily focused on law and order — especially when overall crime rates have dropped across the state?
According to Mr Malinauskas, SA Police has a "genuine need" for more resources.
"They've seen demand grow not in crime in the traditional sense and how we might think of it, but more through the burden of increasing demands around domestic violence responses … also with call-outs to mental health cases," he said.
"We've seen that demand grow and we've also got a growing population.
"We haven't had that big uplift in police numbers in our state now for quite a long period of time."
"Tough on crime" policies are considered politically popular, but Mr Malinauskas denied crime would become an election focus for his government.
"I'd much rather have elections focused on other matters — education for instance, rather than crime — but that doesn't mean there isn't a need that we have a responsibility to address."
But that is also the case for the health system, which continues to struggle through ambulance ramping and bed block.
Without a "direct ear" to the treasurer, it is yet to be seen whether doctors, nurses and paramedics will receive the same level of attention from Labor in the months leading up to March 2026, as they did ahead of the last state election.