Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2010-2011 and the Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2010-2011. The main purpose of these bills is to propose appropriations from the Consolidated Revenue Fund for the ordinary annual services of the government in addition to those provided in the budget. In the case of Appropriation Bill (No. 3) it is around $1.36 billion, and in the case of Appropriation Bill (No. 4) it is just over $1 billion.

Whenever called upon to speak on the fiscal decisions of this government we are reminded of the large sums of taxpayers’ money wasted and misspent. From pink batts to school halls there have been expensive policy failures on a grand scale, failures that this Labor government wants to pay for with a litany of new taxes that will punish Australian families. But, just as too much money is being spent on the wrong programs, not enough is being spent where it is needed most. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of mental health.

It is this government’s unconscionable failure to properly fund mental health programs in this country that I would like to address tonight. Nowhere is this more clear than in Appropriation Bill (No. 3) before us, with only little more than $10 million of additional spending allocated for ‘improved mental health and suicide prevention measures’. This is barely a ripple of the wave of government support required for this critical area. The impact mental illness is having on our community touches each and every one of us nearly every day. Only recently one of my friends, whom I met while studying overseas, took his own life. A young man, he had everything to live for—recently married, a great sportsman and with a terrific career ahead of him. His unexpected and untimely death was a ferocious blow to those who knew him. Angus’s suicide awoke me to a tragedy that is all around us. It seems I am being reminded all too often of friends who have lost loved ones. More often than not they are young people with everything to live for. In a moving article in last Saturday’s Weekend Australian magazine, entitled ‘It’s time to talk’, Kate Legge pointed out that 2,191 people took their own lives in 2008. That is far more than tragically die on our roads each year, yet well funded and very public campaigns encouraging road safety are a common occurrence in our society, while tackling suicide is often a subject of taboo—seen but not heard.

This has to change. We need to be far more open about the scale of the challenge that we face. Let us get our heads around this alarming human toll. In Australia, suicide kills seven people a day, or one person every four hours. There are another 180 people every day who attempt suicide. That is one every eight minutes. Suicide is responsible for the most deaths in Australia of persons under the age of 44. Mental illness will be experienced by nearly half of our population at some point in their lives, and one in five people will experience some form of any mental illness in any particular year. It is particularly prevalent among our younger people, with studies showing that nearly half of the Australians aged between 12 and 25 will experience a diagnosable episode of mental illness. In health terms, only cancer and cardiovascular disease affect more people in Australia.

Every day, around 330 people with serious mental illness seek help at a hospital emergency department but are turned away. Around two-thirds of those suffering from mental illness have no access to professional help. The Mental Health Council of Australia estimates that up to 85 per cent of the 100,000 homeless people in Australia and 75 per cent of those with alcohol and substance abuse issues also suffer some form of mental illness.

Why, when the statistics tell us such a clear story, do we continue to chronically underfund mental health? Why, when mental illness represents 13 per cent of the healthcare burden, does it receive only six per cent of healthcare funding? It cannot be because of a lack of social cost, because personally many of us know it all too well. It cannot be because of a lack of economic cost, because experts like Access Economics have quantified it, estimating it to be costing our society in the vicinity of $30 billion per annum. In my mind, it has to be due to a lack of political will. In years gone by, we—metaphorically speaking—in this place have not done enough.

But at the 2010 election we started to see a major shift. The Leader of the Opposition’s $1.5 billion package of reforms for mental health was a game changer. Professor John Mendoza, Chairman of the National Advisory Council on Mental Health until his resignation in protest last year, described it as, ‘The most significant announcement by any political party in relation to a targeted evidence based investment in mental health.’ The coalition’s commitment to the establishment of 20 early psychosis intervention centres in metropolitan and regional areas, providing targeted care to persons aged 15 to 24 at clinical high risk; to the funding for the capital and recurrent cost of 800 new mental health beds; and to the establishment of 60 additional youth headspace sites, first introduced by the Howard government in 2006 to provide a one-stop shop for young people aged 12 to 25 years for information and services relating to health and wellbeing, including alcohol and substance abuse, are exactly the types of initiatives that both John Mendoza and Professor Patrick McGorry, the 2010 Australia of the Year and professor at the Centre for Youth Mental Health at the University of Melbourne have been calling for.

There will always be the need for more funding, but the 2010 election commitment by the coalition was more than a significant start. It was a paradigm shift and it is a commitment that the coalition strongly stands by. Unfortunately, the Labor Party did not match the coalition’s election commitment and since forming government has been a major disappointment. It is fine for the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, to say during the campaign, ‘Illness of the mind is as debilitating as illness of the heart, the lungs or the bones and no less important or deserving of our understanding and care.’ But where is the money? It is fine for Labor to appoint a Minister for Mental Health and Ageing, the member for Port Adelaide, Mark Butler, and parade him in front of the sector claiming that they are giving the issue more attention. But why then ignore him during question time, in which he has only ever spoken about mental health on two occasions? In fact, the minister was happy to write in his foreword to the 2010 national mental health report:

… the system needs an overhaul to build a modern system of mental health care in Australia.

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As a community, we need to do better.

Hang on! As a government, you need to do better. Stop trying to shift the blame. It is you—the Labor government—that must do better. It is after all, according to the Prime Minister, the year of delivery and decision. The message for Labor is clear: words will not wash; it is action that counts. This is not just the coalition telling you that you need to act; it is the healthcare industry and your own appointed experts. It is the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission with its 12 mental health recommendations, the Australian Medical Association in its 2011 budget submission and a host of individual experts like Professors McGorry and Mendoza, who are imploring the government to undertake large-scale, long-term reform. More resources for system capacity, research and early intervention, or what is termed ‘intergenerational equity’, are both critical and urgent. To the government I say: you have expectedly but shamefully failed the test in this appropriations bill. One hopes that, come the May budget, you will see the light, seek to correct this wrong and better fund mental health services in this country to the benefit of all Australians.

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