Anthony Byrne (Holt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to comment on a pretty profound and provocative program on this evening's Four Cornersprogram entitled There is No 3G in Heaven. The telecasting of it coincides with World Suicide Prevention Day today. I would like to commend reporter Liz Jackson and producer Mary Ann Jolley, who not only dealt with an incredibly difficult and painful subject very sensitively but told a story that needed to be told. As I have said, this evening Four Corners telecast a program which focused on the Summit on Youth Suicide, which I convened on Saturday, 11 August 2012. Close to 300 people attended.

I wish to deeply thank everyone who attended this summit and to acknowledge the bravery of the people who shared their stories about their friends and family members who had taken their own lives. I know how incredibly difficult it was for each of those people to share their story. Because they have shared their incredibly powerful and extremely emotional stories, we as a community are in a better position to address this issue. I am extremely proud of how we as a community came together to not only talk about these stories and share these stories for the common good but also protect, in my view, the most precious assets in our community, our kids.

I want to point out to every person who attended the summit and who had been affected by youth suicide that they no longer have to shoulder the burden of coming to terms with the tragedies themselves. It is up to the community and community leaders to accept responsibility for what has occurred and to ensure that appropriate action is taken to prevent further tragedies from occurring. As I have said before, the loss of one life is one life too many.

Since the summit, I have met with and continue to meet with many members of the local community to discuss ways to better prevent people taking their own lives. The summit was the starting point of a conversation and we need to keep talking. For example, last week I met with Maree Dale, who was shown asking a question to Four Corners. She expressed her frustration at the fact that she sought help for her son, who took his own life, but that it was made incredibly difficult when every six weeks the mental health expert looking after her son moved on. Accordingly, Maree has conveyed to me the need to train more mental health professionals so that one professional can stay looking after their patient for the entire period when they need support. Maree has also informed me that people looking for mental health care need to trust their carer and that it is hard to build that trust when your carer moves on. It is difficult to maintain the continuity of treatment and the continuity of the same person providing the treatment.

I also met with Reverend John McMahon, who runs a youth suicide prevention program, Motov8, and with Drew Gormlie from Spiritworx, who runs training programs such as ASIST, Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training. That organisation provides practical training for caregivers seeking to prevent the immediate risk of suicide. Both John and Drew must be commended on their efforts to take action locally.

As the Four Corners program clearly showed, there is much work for us to do in delivering sufficient mental health services to the Australian community. However, I want to specifically acknowledge the work of two people: Professor Patrick McGorry, Australian of the Year 2010; and Jo Robinson, who is Executive Director of Orygen Youth Health and who also works for headspace. Both Patrick and Jo are doing tremendous work in raising awareness about the issue of suicide. Both of them made substantial contributions at the forum that was being conducted. I am looking forward to working with Patrick and Jo in the future to ensure that the rollout of headspace centres and other suicide prevention programs for young people continues.

I would also like to briefly mention a person who was not on the program, Dani Rothwell. Dani was one of the young people who first raised the enormity of the issue with me. She had lost friends to suicide and asked that I specifically raise that issue. She was one of the driving, moving forces that led me to convene this forum. Time is running short, but I would like to commend the people who were actually on the program, who spoke from their heart about their loss: Dee McIntyre, Carol Menzies, Jessica Cummings and Thom Heartland. Jessica and Thom created a Facebook page: 'Coming Together to Prevent Youth Suicide'. Also present were Julz Courtis, Yollondah Ametoglou, Susan Ametoglou and, as I have just said, Maree Dale.

Can I finish with the words of Dee McIntyre, who had lost Paige. She was the first person who was featured on the program. She said:

It's a really hard thing to deal with and as a family and as a parent, you, you do want your privacy and you do need your privacy when it first happens but I think that we really need to look at the bigger picture and we need to get a message across to society and to the kids that this is a huge problem because it is and I want to talk about it so that it's out there and that people are aware that it's happening and that it could be their kids that it's going to happen to.

I would like to commend Dee and all the people who participated in the summit. We must do whatever it takes to stop this from happening.

House adjourned at 22:30