Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to pay tribute to the great achievement in Australian history which has occurred in my electorate of Mitchell. In recent weeks I had the privilege of attending the opening of Australia's first purpose-built private mental health hospital. This is what I regard as a remarkable achievement. Two psychiatrists, Dr Ted Cassidy and Dr Jason Pace, had the vision to establish Australia's first purpose-built private mental health facility—and what an achievement it is.

It is a hospital facility at Kellyville on the corner of Arnold Road, only a few kilometres from the original mental asylum declared by Governor Lachlan Macquarie, the first asylum in Australian history, also in my electorate of Mitchell at Castle Hill. Governor Macquarie, after the battle of Vinegar Hill, declared that the Castle Hill site, in recognition of the trauma created by that incident, would become an asylum. We were very privileged to have the current governor, Governor Marie Bashir, attend and open Australia's first purpose-built private mental health hospital. It was a remarkable occasion. She made an excellent point. She noted that the word 'asylum' means a safe place or refuge. Asylum was a beautiful word that meant Castle Hill and also meant Kellyville, just down the road.

It is fantastic to see such great achievement come to fruition in light of what regulatory and other impositions are placed on such achievement in Australia today. Dr Ted Cassidy and Dr Jason Pace are fantastic visionary psychiatrists. They have worked in public health most of their lives and in private practice recently. They are serious veteran professionals. But to put together from the ground up a hospital capable of housing initially 30 and then some 60 patients is no easy thing to do in Australia. I am sad to say that it required great forbearance and great overreach from these two great human beings to go through with the process.

I want to record in the House today that I think we ought to be doing more to take out the impediments to such great and visionary achievement in our country. I have spoken with them about the impediments, difficulties and challenges they faced from government. I want to record that not a cent of government money went into this facility—not a single cent. And yet we have this fantastic private mental health hospital, the first of its kind in Australia today. It is purpose-built. There are plenty of other facilities that get rebuilt. Commonly it will be explained to you that most often mental health facilities are rebuilds because of the guidelines that exist in Australia today. Those guidelines have become an impediment. People will go for low-cost facilities in a rebuild rather than build a new purpose-built facility, which I think is a great shame. When you go there and you see the design, the use of modern construction and the use of gardens—the return of gardening and the use of plants in the treatment of mental illness is quite well documented—you really get a sense from this building and this place that this purpose-built facility is going to achieve its purpose. Buildings have purpose. They have form. They have a reason for being designed the way they are. That is no different with a mental health facility. So of course, if we have guidelines in this country today that restrict or impede the development of such facilities, we ought to look at them.

The state government initially exempted this fine facility from its cut. But by the time it came around, because of the local council requirement that the hospital give up a small parcel of land for a road, they had to resubmit their DA and then they came under ridiculous state legislation that required further hundreds of thousands of dollars from what was going to be a mental health hospital, which ought to be exempt from ridiculous bureaucracy and government regulation. These challenges ought not be put in front of such fine work and fine achievement, and it ought not be as hard. In fact, when I asked them, they both recorded that if they had known how hard it would be to get this facility built they might not have gone ahead in the beginning. It is a sad indictment of our society today that we would regulate in such a way that would prevent this kind of great human achievement or make it so difficult.

I want to record that Dr Ted Cassidy and Dr Jason Pace have made this facility a fine success. They already have 30 patients within the first month of opening. When I visit that facility and I see the work that they have done in putting together from the ground up a fully functioning private hospital, without a cent of government money or any help and just purely from their investments and their passion for treating the mentally ill, I am very proud of that. When you visit the rooms that are named after key Australians who have made achievements in this field—such as the Australian psychiatrist who discovered that lithium had an important use in psychiatry—you get the sense that these are two professionals honouring their profession and honouring the mentally ill.