Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Mental Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Shortland for her question. For the benefit of the chamber, I am sworn as the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Mental Health Reform so that I can be sworn to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet because that is where the National Mental Health Commission is situated as an agency, for reasons I will explain shortly.

I thank the member for Shortland for hosting me last week in her beautiful electorate, for the events we were able to hold there and for the discussions particularly that we were able to have with an incredibly impressive and resilient group of young people in San Remo. This is a group of young people who have been through pretty tough times in family circumstances dealing with mental health issues, who advocated very clearly and forcefully the need for mental health services in the northern part of the Wyong Shire. The strip from the Central Coast up to Newcastle is well serviced by headspace services. The headspace Gosford service, now called headspace Central Coast, is one of the oldest headspaces and one of the most professional services we have in the country. Deb there is a great leader of headspace, not just in that part of New South Wales but around the country. We were able to open headspace Newcastle last week as well.

The arguments were forcefully made that there perhaps is the need for us to consider some support for the northern Wyong Shire Council, nestled between Gosford and Newcastle. I was particularly struck by some of the arguments made by young people, their parents, their teachers, their high school principals and, in some cases, their grandparents about the particular social circumstances of that part of the Shortland electorate. There are relatively speaking low rates of car ownership impacting on someone's capacity to drive to Gosford or to Newcastle. The relatively low rates of internet connection restrains a young person's ability to tap into our investments in e-headspace and other mental health initiatives. That for me was a very powerful discussion and again I thank you for that.

As your question intimates, the National Mental Health Commission is structurally a very important part of our mental health reform agenda. I want to place on record that the idea of mental health reform and the need to improve mental health services has happily been a bipartisan idea for several years. We differ sometimes on the details of that effort, but I am very pleased that, from the community's point of view, that is seen as a bipartisan obligation on all governments—Commonwealth or state.

As I was developing the reform agenda to take to cabinet for the 2011 budget process, I heard very forcefully from mental health academics but also and most importantly from consumers and carers that they wanted a body like the National Mental Health Commission, for two reasons. They wanted an agency at arm's length from government that would report without fear or favour on the performance of our mental health services. We have reported now for more than 20 years in this country in minute detail the number of beds we have in the mental health system, the number of staff we have in the system, but we have not been good at reporting on outcomes. We have not been good at reporting on the degree to which those investments through taxpayer dollars change people's lives and help them recover from their illness, help them connect back with their families and communities, back to work, back into stable housing and so on.

That is the message I heard most clearly from consumers and carers, and that is the job of the National Mental Health Commission. They have done it marvellously well in their first year. The report card that they released just before Christmas put a spotlight—I think for the first time—on the extraordinary physical health disadvantage that, particularly, people with severe mental illness experience. Their life expectancy gap—the gap between their life expectancy and the average—is almost 30 years. The only other group in the Australian community that experiences a similar life expectancy gap is Indigenous Australians. I think that was a very powerful piece of work, and they also put the spotlight back on the use of seclusion and restraint, particularly in state mental health systems.

Robyn Kruk has been a great leader of this commission. She is a former New South Wales Director General of Premier and Cabinet and director general of the health service. She has held senior positions in the APS. She has announced her retirement from the APS, and consequently the position of head of the commission, in the past several weeks. I want to place on record her work in setting up the commission to be, I think, a long-term benefit to the Australian community.

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