The Adelaide Advertiser has published a poll on South Australian state voting intention from a sample of 522, showing Labor leading the Liberals 56-44 on two-party preferred. After distribution of the 12 per cent undecided, Labor leads 43 per cent to 37 per cent on the primary vote. Breakdowns between city and country show Labor leading 57-43 outside Adelaide. However, the previous Advertiser poll published last September had the Liberals leading in the country 58-42, pointing to a scarcely credible 15 point turn-around – although the earlier poll had a total sample of just 365. Martin Hamilton-Smith is far ahead of his party rivals as preferred Liberal leader.
Strange if the Tiser cooked the RAH poll. Why? Because the Tiser itself ran an editorial in support of the government’s hospital plan only a few weeks ago.
Phil Bentley is a wily operator (and a highly qualified economist) who is currently the subject of a fair bit of innuendo, but so far not a shred of evidence has been produced to link him with the SAJC fiasco.
Oh, and while Tiser polls generally have a pretty good record, the one giving Labor big numbers in the country has to be total bulls—t.
TT
That’s true. The Tiser has been very pro-Marj. They really spat the dummy when the name was changed. They also want a new hospital.
I suppose it will all come out about Bentley in court. As you say, there are lots of allegations that he knew about the problems of the SAJC. Ploubidis looks like a street fighter and I imagine he has documented conversations etc. He’s not going down without a fight. It could all get very interesting.
gawd Dio, does anyone take TT seriously? they have no credibility whatsoever, i cant understand where the Advertiser got their poll from, most of the folk i’ve spoken to really want the new hospital, i certainly do having suffered the discomforts of the RAH as a patient, i guess you’d call it self preservation, last time i went into hospital i’d have preferred the doctors and staff at the RAH but chose calvary instead, thats the good thing with being a war widow i can have whatever hospital i want within reason.
SA Libs release RAH plans
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,25227983-5006301,00.html
JB
Please tell me you’re not one of those Labor supporters who doesn’t believe the polls when they don’t show what they want. The AdelaideNow site was full of them, exactly the same ones who were cheering the 56-44 result from the exact same poll.
They asked me if I’d publicly come out in favour of the new RAH. I decided to politely decline. They asked me for the names of any other docs who they could use (“use” being the operative word) to support their case. I could only think of one of any note.
Repeated golden staph alone is reason enough for the new RAH. There’s no way to clear it out completely from the current RAH.
I don’t have a problem with polls – just the conclusions that people draw from them are often incorrect.
hey Dio, much as i’d love to believe the latest Advertiser poll that we’re on now–but i cant, the turnaround is just too much, if you read my blog at the beginning of this thread thats exactly what i said, if you go by these voting thingys the first is the reactions to the libs hospital plan and the second is the results on the new hospital.
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/poll/display/0,22621,5038746-5006301-1,00.html
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/poll/display/0,22621,5038734-5006301-1,00.html
quite frankly i’m going on personal experience, my stay in the RAH was a nightmare –and Dio i’m very stoical and not a whinger, the staff were marvelous but the facilities were bloody uncomfortable, i couldnt get out of there fast enough and wouldnt willingly go back if i had a choice. 🙂
bob1234
The New RAH will get infested with MRSA about 10 minutes after it’s opened. It’s the chronically ill patients the RAH attracts. VRE is more of a problem. We haven’t got rid of it since Bali.
JB
Those online polls are a joke. That’s what Mike Rann uses his two hundred media monitors for. Vote, clear cache, vote, clear cache, repeat etc until you go home. The Libs do the same. The 62-31 poll was a proper phone poll.
Dio, i wonder if it was as spot on as the Queensland polls saying both parties were neck to neck, 500 or so people isnt a very large pool of voters, its got a very large margin of error.
JB
It was 62% to 31%. A poll of 522 has a MOE of about 5%. The “old” RAH camp is miles ahead of the “new” RAH camp. It’s all John Hill’s fault. I’ve been saying this for ages but none of you would believe me. And now I’ve been proven right. I love being right more than anything in the world.
Hahahahahahaha @ Turnbull lavishing praise on Rann’s bikie laws on the 7:30 report. He even said it should go national!
I bet MHS hates Turnbull at the moment.
Dio, that was a fairly smug assertion, can i ask is your anti the new hospital stance because you genuinely believe it’s wrong or because you dislike Hill? look you have your opinion as a doctor and i have mine as someone who was a patient, i was ill enough not to have to put up with the crumbling facilities, four weeks of that and if they had’nt let me go home i’d have gone anyway, thank god for the district nurses who saw to me, actually i’ve got one calling in every day right now for a minor thing they’re great, wild animals wouldnt drag me back into the old hospital, we’re not going to change each others mind and to be quite honest i wouldnt try, my main push with the government is SAPOL funding and law and order policies. 🙂
JB
I’m not anti-New RAH. I’m sitting on the fence at the moment coz I don’t trust either lot to tell us the truth. I was anti-Marj. I don’t know enough about engineering to decide between the two. FMC, the QEH and WCH are just as bad as the RAH.
Newspoll steady at 56/44. Preferred PM now 65/20. Last Newspoll PPM 61/21.
I’ve always been of the opinion that people in general approach arguments about the hospital (or other major government projects for that matter) in the wrong way. The approach generally taken is what is wrong with the proposal? The question really being asked should be what is right with the proposal. In the case of the new RAH it should really be a debate about what is good about building a new hospital v what is right about redeveloping the existing hospital. The debate is nothing like this – but it should be. People get way too obsessed with knocking projects rather than focusing on the “good”. There is a general reluctance to accept change because it’s different to what already exists.
I agree with Diogenes – you can’t use any arguments regarding MRSA, VRSA etc for the new hospital being better – as it’s the patients that bring the bugs into the hospital after all! The slightly disturbing thing is quite a lot of us have these bugs already albeit in a dormant form. The epidemiology of the distribution of these bugs in the population as a function of time is quite interesting.
sykesie
Almost all the VRE at the RAH came from the Bali victims. They jumped in the pool and sea etc. Somehow they almost all arrived with VRE, which surprised me greatly as you wouldn’t think Bali would be infested with VRE, unless they use dodgy antibiotic food practices. I literally took years for the VRE to get under control.
Similar trends were seen in the USA after the second Gulf War I believe and the return of injured American troops to American hospitals.
Why is there so much VRE in those places? We always think of these multi-resistant bugs as being the product of over-prescription of antibiotics in first-world countries and the use of broad-spectrum antibiotics in animal feed.
The VRE was much worse than MRSA. We had to use antibiotics I’d never even heard of which cost thousands a day. MRSA isn’t nearly as bad as everyone says; it’s pretty easy to treat but VRE was a disaster. We didn’t have any deaths from Bali at the RAH but we certainly had deaths from VRE which came back from there and spread.
The bad news from a drug discovery perspective (which is my field of expertise), is there are very few new antibiotics in phase III clinical trials. Big pharma just don’t see the returns in this area, because any new drugs developed are generally kept as a drug of last resort – which obviously means that the dividends they receive are not as good. Hence the ridiculous costs of using some of these more unheard of antibiotics.
You can’t blame them. As you said, they really were Hail Mary drugs. Still, the NHMRC should be putting money into this as it’s a potentially huge problem.
Bearing in mind that I’m biased because I work for a company tendering for the new-RAH, from an engineering perspective it is generally better to go with a new building than to try and refit an existing one. You can talk about saving costs on construction, but at the end of the day, the space constraints that you have to work with and dealing with existing plant really limits what you can do. Because you end up so highly limited, you then have only limited plant selections you can get by with and may have to go with much more expensive options. Retrofitting old buildings to bring them up to scratch with current BCA requirements can be a huge pain. When you design a building from scratch, you can really make sure there’s enough room to get the equipment in that you need.
Al
Any truth to the very strong rumour that the engineers at the New RAH site have hit Torrens River groundwater and things are looking very grim?
Any idea how long before the Jan-Mar Newspoll is out?
No idea, sorry. I’m not a civil/enviro engineer so it’s not really my area. There will be a huge amount of contamination on the site, so significant civil works will be required. As far as I was aware, I thought they’d discovered the diesel contamination had reached the groundwater. I can’t see how groundwater would stop construction.
Al
I thought the groundwater would just add to the complexity and therefore expense. It might be enough to tip the viability over to rebuild on site or build at Keswick Barracks or the Clipsal site.