Those of us with an appetite for the absurd were served up an absolute treat this week by South Australian Health Minister Stephen Wade, who confidently joined the pantheon of comic greats such as Monty Python's hospital administrator who swoons over the machine that goes ping and Yes Minister's manager of the hospital with no patients.

Mr Wade was holding forth in SA's Legislative Council this week on the topic of a turnaround plan devised to extract the Central Adelaide Local Health Network (CALHN) out of a $300 million budget mire it appears to have got itself into.