Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] The member for Bennelong is right, in that the government has increased the number of headspace services, but that is not enough. There is a big systemic issue with headspace, which I'm going to talk about in this speech. First of all, let me say that this motion is really important. The mental ill health of young people in Australia is a growing issue that we all must confront as members of parliament and as people who all care deeply about the future generations, but this is a systemic policy issue that can be addressed by the government today. I'm going to go through two key areas of policy that we should be implementing, not just talking points from the Prime Minister's office.

The first key area is around headspace. The biggest issue with headspace is staff. Yes, there is an increased number of headspace services around the country—that's a good thing, and I acknowledge the government doing that—but, if you're a staff member at headspace working as a therapist, a mental health professional in Australia, the Medicare rebate for a session at a headspace is somewhere in the vicinity of just over $80 for 50 minutes. You can basically bill a young person around $80 for that service via the Medicare rebate system. The way that headspace services work is that most of the staff pay rent. They also have overheads. Many of the professionals, OTs and psychologists would have supervisors as well. There's also the cost to get to and from the headspace service. So what most mental health professionals are earning at a headspace these days is much closer to $27 to $35 an hour for high-quality mental health services for our young people. That's just not sustainable. You can earn a better living stacking shelves or working as a labourer in this country than you would working as a mental health professional helping young people in these really important clinics. Many of the people who turn up to headspace can't afford private mental health services; they are young people who cannot afford to access private clinicians or private therapies. Therefore, what we're seeing is that the really good practitioners in youth mental health can't afford to stay in the headspace services, because they just can't earn enough of a living. So we really need to look at that rebate so that we can provide high-quality staff with adequate pay in order for them to help service and treat young people in our headspace services.

The other big policy issue relating to youth mental health that we need to confront is around the access to adequate care. So many different reviews, including royal commissions in Victoria and other policy reviews, have shown time and time again that the much, much higher interventions—so not just one-hour sessions, but the much more involved and higher levels of intervention, whether it be more wraparound services or a range of other high-intensity mental health treatment services—have only been accessible to people who are, basically, deemed to be at risk of suicide. That is a really high threshold for someone to get to in that spectrum of mental health decline. What we need to do is lower that threshold so that more young people can have access to more interventions and much more involved mental health treatments, so that it's not just the one hour of clinical care—and it is amazing that we have that available and, yes, the therapists and those professionals and staff helping young people in that area are so important in the treatment and the support for young people. But the truth is that too many young people are being locked out of the level of care that they actually need, because of a threshold that is too high.

Just to repeat, we need to increase the Medicare rebate and we need to increase the number of young people who can access the higher level of care. They're the policy changes that we could make today that would make a real difference in this important sector.

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