Appearing before parliament’s budget and finance committee on Tuesday, Rik Morris, chief executive of the Premier’s Delivery Unit, was quizzed by Liberal Party MPs about progress on Labor’s 2022 election commitments on ambulance ramping.

Ambulances spent a new record of more than 5500 hours ramped outside Adelaide hospitals in July, according to the most recently released figures.

That’s more than double the 2711 hours lost to ramping in March 2022 when Labor was elected to office on a key pledge to “fix the ramping crisis”. The Malinauskas Government has since committed $7.1 billion in health spending.

Morris, a former Labor staffer, told the committee that “there was never a commitment to fix ramping – it was to fix the ramping crisis”.

Asked by Liberal MP Heidi Girolamo, the committee chair, whether overseeing more than 100,000 hours of ramping is a “change in scope” to that promise, Morris replied: “No it wasn’t.”

“At the last election, the government committed a considerable amount of money to a series of initiatives, some 90 odd I believe,” he said.

“These measures include recruiting hundreds of additional doctors, nurses, paramedics, major infrastructure upgrades, extra beds, new ambulance stations and new ambulance headquarters.

“Those things are being rolled out over the term of this government. They are yet to be fully implemented – the full suite of initiatives.

“I think that once those initiatives are fully implemented is a time when we can judge the success of the election commitment.”

Asked whether he thought it was likely that ramping will be fixed by the election or “will that be another broken promise”, Morris said: “It’s not another broken promise.”

“My expectation is that there will be progress in fixing the ramping crisis, which was the commitment,” he said.

Pushed on whether that meant ramping will not be “fixed” by the next election, Morris said: “There was never a commitment to fix ramping, it was to fix the ramping crisis.”

“There will be progress to measure that against before the term of this government is up.”

The Premier’s Delivery Unit was established shortly after the Malinauskas Government came to office to oversee the delivery of Labor’s election commitments.

It reports directly to the Premier and the cabinet and communicates with public sector agencies to determine whether they are on track to deliver election commitments.

Morris said the more than 90 election commitments made by Labor on health were “all on track”.

Asked whether he accepted ambulance ramping is worse now than when Labor came to office, Morris said: “It’s not in the place that we would like to have it in.”

Rik Morris. Photo: LinkedIn

“But I’m confident that the measures that have been implemented by the Department of Health that the PDU is monitoring will see progress before the next election.”

Morris did confirm that the government has committed to reducing ramping hours to 2018 levels, when time lost to ramping each month hovered between 500 and 1300 hours – well below the current levels of more than 5500 hours.

Ambulance response times have, however, gradually improved under Labor, with 70.4 per cent of priority one callouts – requiring an ambulance within eight minutes – met on time, up from 59.4 per cent in March 2022.

The percentage of priority two callouts – requiring an ambulance within 16 minutes – met on time recently dipped to 55 per cent, but is still an improvement on 40.9 per cent in March 2022.

Labor promised before the election to lift the percentage of priority two callouts that arrive on time to 85 per cent.