George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise again tonight to make an urgent plea to the government for the lives of young people in the Dawson electorate. The Mackay region is generally regarded as financially advantaged, and in some ways that is true. The average wage in the Mackay region is above average as a result of good employment prospects in the mining industry. However, those good jobs are enjoyed by only a small section of the community.

The region is socially disadvantaged as a result of shift work and fathers, husbands and mothers being away from home—four days on and four days off, or worse. These disadvantages compound other problems to create an unacceptably high suicide rate in Mackay. When researcher Leda Barnett began work on a project in Mackay, the city was in the midst of a suicide cluster. Suicide has a powerful effect on people, and it is not uncommon for family and friends to take their own lives in response.

Seven years ago, a group of young people in Mackay were devastated when two of their friends committed suicide only weeks apart. Debbie Guzlowski sat in her living room with grieving friends and decided that enough was enough. They formed the Grapevine Group and have been working on suicide prevention ever since. The group plans to make Mackay the most suicide-safe region in Australia. But they have an uphill battle.

According to the National Mental Health Survey, more Australians die from suicide than from motor vehicle accidents—mostly young people, and a high proportion are young Indigenous people. The ‘Reducing youth suicide in Queensland’ discussion paper reported that Queensland children and young people suicide at a rate well above the national average. It found that 48 per cent of youth suicides were contagious or imitative, and 28 per cent of children and young people who suicided in Queensland were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders—mostly between the ages of 10 and 14.

People who work in the mental health industry tell me that suicide is a bigger issue in regional centres than in capital cities, and Mackay has the second-highest suicide rate in the state. But suicide statistics are woefully underreported because single-vehicle accidents, overdoses and other accidents are reported as just that—accidents rather than suicides. The shame of suicide leaves the real facts, the harsh facts, hidden from view. When you consider how much money is spent on awareness and prevention of traffic accidents, you have to ask why we are not taking mental health, which is a much bigger problem, more seriously. This is a problem of life and death, and it is a plague on our modern society.

Mackay youth workers are dealing with children as young as seven years old attempting to take their own lives. One example: a 16-year-old Mackay girl was making an attempt on her life on a monthly basis, using measures as drastic as swallowing battery acid. On one such occasion her parents feared for their own safety as well as for their daughter’s, and they called the police. The girl was taken in handcuffs to the Mackay Base Hospital and was admitted to the psychiatric ward. The psych ward only has 18 beds and they were all full. She was released just one hour later.

There are better solutions out there. Suicide prevention education and early intervention save lives. This has been proved with 30 headspace mental health centres around the nation. But there is no headspace centre in Mackay, where one is so desperately needed. The cost of funding one of these centres is not much in the grand scheme of things and the alternative is simply not acceptable. Tonight I implore the government to allocate the $4 million needed to build a headspace youth mental health centre in Mackay as a matter of urgency.

We are here to make decisions and sometimes these are indirectly decisions of life and death. This is one of those times, and it is time to get our priorities right. That is what we as elected leaders are here to do. We are not here to legislate for a better life for ourselves; we are here to create a better life for the next generation and for generations to come. A headspace centre in Mackay is not a luxury; it is a necessity. It will save lives and it must be included in the next federal budget. Thank you.