Warren Entsch (Leichhardt, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak of an issue that has touched many people, not just in my life but in the lives of many in my electorate. Mr Deputy Speaker, I am sure you are familiar with some of the issues I have raised in the past in relation to mental health. The issue is mental health, the provision of mental health services and the extreme challenges that these providers face in gaining the ongoing financial support from government that enables them to carry out their vital work.

Firstly, it is important to outline some of the programs that are ongoing in my area and a few tragic situations that have really driven home the importance of having these services available. Starting as a pilot in 2010, initially funded by the Queensland government in collaboration with the Centacare in Cairns, the Far North Queensland Rural Division of General Practice, Youth Link and Aftercare, Time Out has been critical for the Cairns community, reducing in-patient stays for young people aged 15 to 25 through early intervention. It has made a huge difference to their lives, many going on training courses and into jobs that they could not have considered before and becoming productive members of society. I had a couple of instances myself where I was able to refer families to this Time Out centre—families that had been absolutely devastated by the challenges of young people with mental health issues. As a consequence of that, these young people have found an opportunity to get a direction and are starting to move on with their lives.

If you think about it purely from a cost perspective, the average stay is about 50 days in the Time Out centre. Compare the cost of a 50-day residential stay with the cost of putting a young person in an adult psychiatric ward, where the average stay is 312 days. If you are arguing economics, you can see that there is a huge difference here. Unfortunately, these kinds of resounding results were not enough to protect this program from funding cuts, the direct result of the former Labor government's slashing funding in Queensland Health.

Time Out was told in January that its funding would be discontinued. At this point, I became involved in the situation, thanks to the tireless campaigning of the Queensland State Manager for Aftercare, Ivan Frkovic. Mr Frkovic and I recognise the overwhelming need for this service, given there is no other centre of this kind in North Queensland. It took some urgent conversations with the Minister for Health in Queensland and Minister Springborg agreed to fund this residential service for a further six months. I will continue to fight to support this service. We need to keep Time Out House alive. These are the sorts of things that are absolutely critical for the mental health and wellbeing of our young people.

After meeting a wonderful lady, Adrianne Hicks, who is a carer for a son with schizophrenia, I was able to secure a grant for a pilot program in 2006 under the Howard government. So successful was this program that the Cairns Mental Health Carers Support Hub was launched in October 2009. The hub is a one-stop shop and its approach has been absolutely fantastic—success for families and services alike. It has seen a threefold increase in families contacting the service, a 300 per cent increase in referrals from other services, a 350 per cent increase in referrals from the hub to other service providers and a tenfold increase in their ability to provide counselling support to carers and families throughout the region. A carers' hub involves the people who actually supply care and support for the carers who keep other people out of mental health institutions. They desperately need the support. Again, if we look at the economic side of things, it is much cheaper to provide funding support for the carers than to institutionalise the people whom they are caring for.

We have had an ongoing battle with funding. The previous government refused to support them. Again, I recognise the importance of this service and the support it offers to family members and carers of people with mental illness. I certainly will continue to fight for this service. I was fortunate in that Minister Dutton has indicated that they will be supporting the carers' hub, but it is short-term funding. We need to get something locked in so that we do not have to fight every year for this and we need to start looking at some long-term commitments. There was a sister venture to this and we had actually received a $350,000 commitment to a mental health clubhouse. The carers' hub was going to be the sponsor for it and if we had not got support for the hub to continue, this other commitment would have fallen over. We would not have been able to support it. Minister Dutton has kept alive the mental health carers support centre and, in doing so, that will allow us the clubhouse, and that will allow people to transition from care to an environment where they can start to do some work and become financially independent. A lot more needs to be done in this area because, quite frankly, governments have been very slow in looking at these ancillary services that actually keep people out of institutions and which are so desperately needed.

The Dr Edward Koch Foundation has been providing suicide prevention activities and support in Far North Queensland for over 18 years. This nonprofit organisation was established in March 1997 and in recent years its primary focus has been suicide prevention and post suicide support. As part of its suicide prevention focus, the foundation delivers life workshops, a life bereavement support service in Far North Queensland, a suicide prevention task force and life suicide prevention plans.

The foundation has always operated on a shoestring budget, but this year its funding has been pulled as a result of actions by the previous government. The foundation's suicide prevention work is internationally recognised, but the former Labor government decided in its wisdom to give its funding to the Wesley Mission as a national organisation, which removes all local expertise from the situation. The irony is that Wesley Mission has recognised the value of the Koch Foundation's program and has asked for permission to replicate the service and use its networks. This is unbelievable and highlights how it is convenient for bureaucrats to dump the money into one national organisation, rather than supporting long-established, internationally recognised organisations that know exactly what needs to be done within the local community.

Another one is the Declan Crouch Fund. Ruth Crouch is a local mum who tragically lost her 13-year-old son, Declan, to suicide in March 2011. She set up the Declan Crouch Fund to raise suicide awareness with money raised through the Dr Edward Koch Foundation. Together the fund and the foundation are running a campaign to lobby politicians for much needed adolescent mental health wards in Cairns. We do not have any at the moment. The petition is online and already has some 6,400 signatures. I am sure it will reach its goal of 10,000. Earlier this year, as part of the Cairns Corporate Challenge, the member for Barron River, Michael Trout, walked the Kokoda Trail and they raised something like $83,000 in support of this wonderful initiative.

Why is there such a focus in my region on services outside the hospital system? Why is there an urgent need for adolescent mental health beds in our hospital? I recently had the opportunity to walk through the adult psychiatric ward and the forensic ward in the Cairns Base Hospital. It was a real shock; it is disgraceful. People working there are doing a great job, but some people come out of prison and go straight into those wards while looking for day release to get out and commit crimes and so go back to prison, which has better facilities than does the hospital. It is little wonder I was contacted by the mother of a 13-year-old girl who had been in and out of that ward since she was 11 because she had been swallowing razor blades and batteries in trying to take her life. It is appalling.

Through intervention I was able to get the state minister, Lawrence Springborg, to have her admitted to the Barrett Adolescent Centre, outside Brisbane. The centre is looking at expanding to Townsville, but it is more appropriate in Cairns. The argument is that Townsville has a wraparound service to support it which is convenient for the bureaucracy. The reality is Cairns has a much greater need because of the rate of suicide. It is about time we look at putting in services where they are needed, rather than for the convenience of the bureaucracy. I will argue strongly for this, because if we do not start to deal with this important issue of service provision for adolescent mental health, we will be a very sad society. I will raise this issue regularly until we get some solutions for these problems in our regional areas.

Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to grieve for the Australian automotive industry. This issue is causing serious concern in my electorate where thousands of skilled workers depend on our car industry and where Holden has its major plants at Fishermans Bend. The fate of Australia's last big manufacturing sector hangs in the wind due to the government's torpor. Inaction is the government's byword. It is caused by deep ideological divisions in the coalition and a fanatic ideology held by some, with some ministers secretly backgrounding the media while in the middle of a hopefully objective assessment by the Productivity Commission. What we need in this debate is rational, considered policy—policy that judges the entire scope of this area of manufacturing and how a small investment by the government multiplies into thousands of jobs, millions of dollars in research and development and significant export dollars. At its height a few years ago when the dollar was not so high, the car industry was exporting nearly $200 million of automobiles to the Middle East, Asia and other places.

Instead, at the moment we see the coalition and the Prime Minister attempting to shift the blame by making it look as though the closure has nothing to do with Australian government policy. We have the member for Warringah saying, 'I do wish Holden would clarify their intentions because at the moment they've got everyone on tenterhooks,' instead of offering to engage with Holden in relation to their future plans. It is not up to the victim of rumour-mongering to respond to those saboteurs who are trying to undermine the manufacturing industry by spreading rumours.

This double game of the government is stark. On the program Lateline, the reporter Chris Uhlmann revealed with a sense of urgency a leak by some leading Australian minister. This is a minister leaking that the automobile manufacturing industry is going to close at a time when his own minister, the Minister for Industry, Mr Macfarlane, is working with the Productivity Commission to see that an objective inquiry is made into how this industry can be supported. If the story had not been broken by the coalition, there would have been no need for the Prime Minister to call on Holden to clarify its intention. It is like goading General Motors as far as possible to close down—hardly the 'open for business' state of affairs for Australia that we heard from the coalition prior to the election.

The coalition is backgrounding journalists about 'supply-chain decisions' in Detroit. This is a clear attempt, in my view, to shift the blame by making it look as though the closure has nothing to do with Australian government policy. Did anyone take the Liberal and National parties seriously when they promised to cut $500 million from the Australian automobile industry prior to the election? I suppose people heard the claims. They did not think that they would go so far as to make redundant the last great area of our manufacturing industry. The Prime Minister says the government 'will not chase them down the road waving a blank cheque at them'—hardly what is being called for—rather than acknowledging the tough field that Australia faces at the moment because of the high dollar and foreign government subsidies. He says:

Ever since the first car rolled off the line in 1949 there have been pots and pots of money available to the car industry in this country.

By contrast, the shadow minister for industry, Senator Carr, said:

For $300 million a year, Holden, Toyota and 160 … manufacturing companies plus all the suppliers that flow from there can be preserved but the Government does not want to face up to its responsibilities.

It is a significant investment but an investment that brings returns. When Labor invested $2.7 billion in this industry, we saw a $26 billion return on new investment. This is a return on investment of nine to one—pretty impressive, in my view. It also means that we directly employ 46,000 people in the car industry in South Australia and Victoria and 33,000 in Victoria still have a job. That is not to mention what $150 million means to the preservation of high-quality jobs in Australia.

A blanket rule cannot be applied to the entire coalition. There are a beleaguered group of MPs, it appears, around Minister Macfarlane who want to keep the car industry and are acting in good faith. Nonetheless, in my view, it is clear—you can read it in the newspapers—that the ideological advocates of the so-called free market, including the member for Higgins and the member for Mayo, seem to be rampant and they seem to reflect the views of many of the members of the government from Sydney, who have contempt for the manufacturing industry. In opposition, the Liberals pledged to cut $500 million from the industry. They are not putting anything further into it, as the Prime Minister insists. South Australian Premier Weatherill said:

So they're going to make it a fait accompli by seeking to destroy Holden through damaging speculation.

…   …   …

… they want to transfer responsibility to Holden, to get Holdens to make the decision to close and absolve themselves of responsibility.

But the effect of doing that would be to jeopardise General Motors' contemplated investment of $1 billion to develop two new models in Australia. It would also undermine the $750 million in research and development that this industry spends a year. It is the biggest research and development expenditure in any industry in Australia. To jeopardise this for relatively small amounts of money from the national budget and for ideological reasons is not rational economics.

There are other important points that coalition members ignore. The auto industry is not operating on a level playing field. The US spends 14 times more money on the automotive industry than Australia, and Germany spends five times as much. In Australia the cost-per-capita support is around $17 per vehicle, far lower than the $90 per person in Germany and the $264 in the United States. There is not a car on the road anywhere in the world that is not supported by the government somewhere. Despite this, Australia's automotive industry has performed relatively well. A significant percentage of all Australian vehicles are exported still and they sell more than 100,000 per year to Australian customers. In recent years the total automotive manufacturing industry turnover has declined because the value of the Australian dollar has increased. It is a very narrow mind that wants to undermine and destroy the capital of this great industry, because the Australian dollar will not stay high forever. Between 60c and 80c, this industry is a very important export earner for Australia. Why destroy the vast capital that has been built up by these companies, the engineering know-how, on the basis of a fanatical free-market ideology?

It is astounding to have a government which dismisses huge job losses that would accompany the end of the auto industry. People in my electorate who host the base of operations are not so blase. The number of jobs that would immediately be lost were the auto industry to close down is, as I said, 46,000 directly. It is estimated by various people, including the Productivity Commission in the past, that the automotive industry indirectly employs 310,000 people. According to some estimates, the effect on the budget bottom line of increased welfare payments if the entire auto industry was to close, and this would happen in a cascading effect if Holden or Toyota were to close, would exceed $20 billion. The automotive industry is important not just for the jobs it creates; $750 million of research and development go into it.

It is time for the government to start thinking practically, practising rational economics, weighing the cost of closing this industry against the small public support that it needs, particularly through this transition time when the Australian dollar is high. We should be thinking clearly and rationally in the economic interest of Australia beyond the immediate time of these few days and we certainly should not be acting on the basis of hardline ideological views that are fashionable with Grace Collier and some of the lesser known ideologues in the Institute of Public Affairs. People in parliament have a responsibility to see that the Australian economy is not undermined in the long term. Between 60c and 80c, where the Australian dollar has been to the American dollar for long periods of time, the Australian automotive industry is very viable and a great export earner for this country.

I know many of the engineers and many of the people who work as skilled tradesmen in the automotive component industry. I grieve for them. I implore serious government members, including the two who are in this chamber tonight, to have a look at again, to make sure that those people in the government who are undermining this do not control the course of events by goading General Motors into making a decision we will all regret.