Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Justice) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Fisher for putting the motion forward today on mental health, and I want to particularly mention the previous speaker, the member for Herbert, and the contribution that she's made. She's talked about some very specific issues that face regions like her own, and she does so from a place of great experience. A lot of people outside this parliament looking in feel that members of parliament don't have experience in the real world, but the woman who spoke before me is a great exception to that. She has been the CEO of a disability mental health organisation in her region, and she just spoke with great passion about what this issue means to her.

My perspective on this comes from two real directions. One of them is that, like most Australians, I'm in a family where we've been affected by mental health. I feel very comfortable standing up and saying that. It's not been the case that people have been able to say that for very long, but it's discussions like this one—and the motion that's been put forward—that have created a space for us to be able to honestly talk about the things that have happened to us and how they affect us. Mental health shouldn't be an issue that's not discussed and, in a way, it's strange that it's not discussed. We know that during their lifetime one in two adults will have a mental health condition of some kind, and the fact that there's not a full and frank and open conversation about that is one of the issues that this parliament has to address.

I mentioned the statistic about one adult in two having a mental health condition. What we also know is that, in any given year, one in five Australians will fall into some kind of mental illness. Something that I'm desperately concerned about, as a member of parliament, is the extent to which this problem is affecting young people, which is the other perspective that I come at this from. We know for young people between the ages of 16 and 24 that almost one in four will be affected by a mental illness in any given year. And some very concerning research was published recently that shows that there's been a tripling of young people aged between 10 and 19 who are presenting at emergency departments as a result of mental illness. So we're not talking here about young people needing counselling because of some bout of depression that begins and ends, but about much more serious mental health conditions that require prolonged treatment. That treatment is simply not available to the young people when they need it, and that's an urgent national problem. Of course, when we get to the most extreme end of this, we see these incredibly tragic suicide statistics in Australia of something like almost 3,000 people a year taking their own lives due to mental illness. It's an urgent problem, and I'm very pleased to have this opportunity to speak about it.

I want to talk about an issue that is particularly affecting my community in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne—that is, the lack of services available to the young people that I've spoken about. I respect the member who's put forward the proposition that we're debating today, but it's important that, as politicians, we don't say one thing and do another. I'm concerned to see that there is a lack of funding and a lack of on-the-ground support for mental health services, and I really see that in my community in Hotham. I have about 9,600 young people who live in the City of Monash, which partly covers my area and partly covers the area of the member for Chisholm. The young people in this region have mounted this incredibly courageous program to push for a dedicated youth mental health service. What we know from talking to these young people is that they actually don't want to access the services that are available to adults. They don't feel comfortable with them, because the types of issues that they are dealing with are often quite specific to issues that confront young people today. And I believe firmly that those young people deserve and warrant a youth-dedicated mental health facility in these suburbs in Melbourne.

Unfortunately, the only option for these young people at the moment is to travel all the way from the City of Monash to the City of Knox. It's more than an hour, once you get to the right train line. I also represent young people who live much further south than the City of Monash, and getting to that line is just not possible for many of them. The Labor candidate for Chisholm ran a fantastic roundtable a few weeks ago on this issue. The young people that we spoke to were some of the most articulate, passionate, well-informed young people I have ever met at a roundtable like this, and their requirement that this is an absolute necessity for us in the south-east was made crystal clear. We haven't seen action from the member for Chisholm on this point, but it's something that I'm going to be working very hard at as we push through this last year of this election cycle. I'm grateful for the chance to speak on it today.

See this speech in context