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

I rise to speak following the tabling of the report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health and Ageing titled Before it's too late: report on early intervention programs aimed at preventing youth suicide. I take this opportunity to congratulate the chairman and the deputy chairman of that committee as well as the secretariat on this important piece of work. As has been said by the previous speakers, more than 2,000 Australian lives are lost each year to suicide. Every day at least seven people lose their life through suicide. Every 15 minutes somebody around this great country attempts it.

With up to 50 per cent of young adults experiencing a diagnosable episode of mental illness between the ages of 12 and 25, this is a very important issue. With only 35 per cent of those with mental illness being able to get access to quality care, it is clear that more needs to be done around early detection and other measures. Indeed, in Australia, according to the ABS, suicide is the 14th most frequent cause of death. But in the age bracket of 15- to 24-year-olds it is the No. 1 cause of death. In 2009, 24 per cent of people in that age bracket died by suicide. It is more common in males than females. A remarkable 76 per cent of those who were lost through suicide in 2009 were males. In the 15 to 24 year age bracket, suicide rates are three times higher for those living in remote and rural locations, and the rate is four times higher for Indigenous people in the 12 to 24 age bracket. Hopefully those statistics give some sense of the scope and nature of the problem that we face.

In Australia, suicide and mental health has been a subject of taboo, but that is changing. We are confronting the statistics and working on innovative ways to tackle the problem. I pay credit to men like John Mendoza and Patrick McGorry, experts in their field, who have spoken up about this important issue and taken sometimes unpopular action which, at the end of the day, has led to greater government intervention in this area. I have been fortunate to speak on numerous occasions to both men, to speak in the parliament about this issue and to engage with groups like GROW and Lifeline and others that are doing work on the front line.

But what do we need to make the situation better? We clearly need more front-line psychological and psychiatric services. We need greater collaboration between service providers. We need additional support for those communities that are affected by suicide. We need to target those people, those individuals, who are at greatest risk of suicide. We need to promote the idea of wellbeing and mental health more robustly in our community. We need to improve the level of mental health literacy among all of us. Specifically, places like the headspace site referred to earlier are very, very important. Currently around Australia there are 30 of these sites, and I welcome moves to increase this number to 90.

I have had correspondence from people in my electorate about this issue. Laura Lloyd wrote to me about a girl named Prerna Diksha, from Fintona Girls School in Balwyn, in my electorate. Her brother, Abhishek Gaurav, who was a young teenager at Camberwell Grammar School, tragically took his own life, and she is asking why. Their family was actually from Boronia, and she is working with my friend and colleague the member for Aston, Alan Tudge, on getting a new headspace centre in the Knox shopping strip. This is a really worthwhile initiative and deserves to be supported. Likewise, in my own electorate of Kooyong I would like to see a headspace site. I think access to these services for young people would be a great improvement on what is currently available.

This report that has been tabled by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health and Ageing looks at the risk factors for suicide and breaks them into three areas: the individual, the social and the contextual. Under the individual, it talks about substance abuse, homelessness, mental illness, poor coping skills, chronic pain or illness; under the social, it talks about abuse, violence, family dispute, conflict and dysfunction, peer rejection, social isolation and imprisonment; and, under the contextual, it talks about a lack of support services, poverty and neighbourhood violence. These are all factors that government experts tell us help to create a situation in which suicide is more likely.

While I welcome the government's initiative at the last budget to improve funding in mental health, I want to note that it has come at some expense, particularly the cuts to the Better Access program, where people were able to access psychologists and GPs and get rebates for those visits for treatment for mental health issues. That has been cut by this government. But, by and large, an investment of any new money is extremely important in the area of mental health.

Some of the other recommendations in this report which should be taken note of include the recommendation for standardised reporting of suicide figures. There is scope there for extending the data collection, taking into better account geography, culture, employment and socioeconomic status, and getting the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Australian Research Council and the Australian Suicide Prevention Advisory Council to work more closely on research initiatives and to develop a priority research agenda. While research funding has increased more than threefold since 2001-02, it still sits at only about $65 million per annum. There must be scope to explore new ways of capitalising on social media and the internet to engage with our young people to mitigate the risk of suicide. New youth suicide prevention measures are also recommended, as well as adopting an holistic approach to these new measures which takes into account cultural, educational, employment, social and economic disadvantage factors.

Better measures to provide continuity of care for school leavers is also recommended. Often you can find a school student getting advice and support on mental health related issues but once they leave school they are left to their own devices. We need better partnerships between the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations and community based providers to ensure that these people do not fall between the cracks. We need to encourage our teachers to receive specific training on mental health awareness to increase their capacity to recognise and assess suicidal risk and to ensure that those people get the best attention.

This issue of youth suicide and mental health is an absolute priority for any government. I welcome new initiatives in this area. I pay particular credit to Tony Abbott for, ahead of the last election, taking the initiative in this area. I pay credit to those in the industry like Patrick McGorry, John Mendoza and many others people who have worked tirelessly behind the scenes for years to create greater awareness in government about what needs to be done. Not everything can be provided by the private sector. Not everything can be left to the market. Mental health is one such issue where governments need to step in.

If we take the measures recommended, together with others that are being undertaken, to encourage early detection, to better equip our service providers and our teachers, to provide better access for young people to headspace, EPPIC and other facilities as well as to remove the stigma that currently sometimes applies to mental health we will have a better chance of reducing these horrific figures where over 2,000 Australians die each year through suicide and where young Australians are disproportionately represented in those statistics.

I commend the committee and the secretariat for their work. Now that this body of work exists, it is incumbent upon government to take its recommendations, to consider them and hopefully to introduce them into Australian society.

Debate adjourned.

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