Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to talk about two events that have taken place in my electorate of Page over the last week. Both of them are quite dear to my heart in different ways. Firstly, at my invitation the Minister for Mental Health and Ageing, Mark Butler, joined me in having a community conversation on the broad issue of mental health and where the mental health reforms are, so that he could have direct input from people in my electorate.

I did that in two parts. There was an open conversation co-hosted by me and Professor Deborah Saltman and Professor Iain Graham from Southern Cross University’s School of Health and Human Sciences. We invited the community, and community members were able to have a few hours for an open discussion with the minister, which was very useful. At the end of the conversation I said that sometimes when ministers go around and hear from communities they might not always get new ideas—this time he did get a couple—but it reinforces commonly held ideas and views that we have in the community about the ways that we should respond to people with mental illness and to their carers and family.

The minister was welcomed by a local choir, the Hearing Voices Choir, which has been set up over the last few years in Lismore and is sponsored by New Horizons, a service provider. The people in the choir have mental illness, and it has been a wonderful thing for them. We all like singing, even if we cannot sing. I can hear members laughing! We enjoy singing; it is what we do. Singing can actually bring some joy. I know people in that choir who have not talked a lot over the last few years and who have really come out of themselves. They sang the minister in, which was really nice, and they stayed and joined us. I really appreciated it.

One idea came up from one of the members. He said that people with mental illness—and he was generalising—may spend a lot of time at night not sleeping between those hours of 10 and 4. They listen to a lot of commercial radio, and I thought, ‘I think some of that might do your head in!’ But that is when they are awake at night and listening. He said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if there could be a little bit more in the way of messages by speaking directly to people who have mental illness.’ We then pondered how we could do that and all the difficulties of it, but it was a nice idea and a good idea—one that the minister was able to take away—and we might even work on that locally.

Among the other things that came up was a very common issue which has been around for a long time and is very difficult to resolve but has to be resolved—that is, people working together. Also, when someone has a mental illness, if they present themselves at a health service, they should be able to get through the door no matter what manifestation they have of the illness or what age they are. I have an example: one woman had a child of 11 years old and could not see the child psychiatrist because the child psychiatrist treated children from 12 to 25 and therefore had no treatment. That is just ridiculous, because if you had a broken arm you would get through the door, and it has to be the same with mental health—you should be able to get through the door and you should not have to shop around. It is one of those frustrations that happen to people with mental illness, their families and their carers.

Everybody often looks to the federal or state government—whoever they may be—to fix it, but I said: ‘A lot of that can be fixed locally. It is not up to a minister for mental health or someone else to reach his hand down and do it; we can fix those things locally.’ There was a real commitment to that that day, and, because we had the health services, the NGOs, all of the practitioners and the people themselves there, it was good. People want an adult headspace. We talk a lot about the youth headspaces, but an adult headspace was one of the issues that we talked about. There were many other things like that. I did say there were two issues, but I only got to deal with that one. I will come back to the other one at another opportunity.