Some failures run so long, Jeremy Cordeaux argued on this week’s Court of Public Opinion, that we stop seeing them at all. Ambulance ramping in South Australia — 5,434 hours of it in one month — has become precisely that: vast, relentless, and somehow no longer news.
The Figure
Five thousand, four hundred and thirty-four hours. That is how long, across a single month, patients sat waiting in the backs of ambulances outside South Australian hospitals, unable to be admitted. And the trend, Jeremy noted, is worsening, not improving.
Behind that number are people in genuine distress, and paramedics stuck in hospital driveways rather than racing to the next emergency. It is the mark of a health system under sustained pressure.
The Promise That Broke
What angered Jeremy most was the politics beneath it. Ramping, he reminded listeners, was a defining issue — the state government won office promising to fix it. That pledge, he argued, moved votes. Yet the problem remains unsolved; by this measure, it has grown worse.
For some reason, he said, the government is simply not being held to that promise. A commitment that helped deliver power has quietly gone unmet, with little apparent cost.
When A Crisis Goes Quiet
The most troubling part, for Jeremy, was the silence. Ramping, he observed, barely makes the news anymore. The crisis has become so routine it has slipped into the background — accepted as simply what happens when you’re taken to hospital by ambulance.
That normalisation is its own hazard. When a serious, continuing failure stops producing headlines, the pressure to fix it drains away. The problem endures precisely because everyone has stopped treating it as one.
Keep It Or Go
Jeremy’s proposed standard was characteristically plain. When a government makes an election promise — especially one that shifts votes — it should keep it, or resign. Pledges that win power, in his view, ought to carry real consequences.
Applied to ramping, that principle would leave a stark choice: deliver the promised fix, or answer for failing to. Instead, Jeremy argued, the government has been permitted to do neither — to break the promise and carry on regardless.
Refusing To Look Away
The core of Jeremy’s message was a refusal to let the crisis fade from view. 5,434 hours is not a figure to shrug at; it is a system failing the people who need it most, at the very worst moments of their lives.
By stating the number and the broken promise plainly, Jeremy set out to drag ramping back into the conversation — to insist, against the drift toward acceptance, that this is not simply the way things must be.
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Catch the complete Garage edition of The Court of Public Opinion, recorded live around the dining room table.
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