Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the recent sod turning for the new Kempsey headspace. In doing so, I reflect on 30 years ago, when I commenced work as a police officer in the very same town. Having completed all my training, I knew all about the law and I knew all about procedure. But what we did not know about was how to recognise the symptoms of mental ill health in young people, let alone how to help them and what to do. This quite often then moved to just thinking that they were bad kids from bad families, and ultimately they became part of the criminal justice system. The overwhelming majority of them were Indigenous kids, who ended up becoming statistics in the overrepresentation of Indigenous youth in custody.

Thankfully, those times have changed significantly in relation not only to the police approach but to the community's approach to youth mental health and support. From 2006 onwards, as a lawyer in criminal law, I had quite a bit to do with mental health and headspace. I very quickly realised that headspace was not a cold, clinical, forensic place that attempted to deal with the result in front of them but rather a soft entry to support and address the cause. In my experience, the results were remarkable.

I did have the good fortune of attending the ground-breaking ceremony, led by Uncle Fred from the Dunghutti and Thangatti nation. The people there spoke highly of this initiative. One said it was the best thing to happen to Kempsey in many years. Another said that it will provide a place for the Macleay youth to go and give themselves a better shot at life. The Primary Health Network has chosen the Samaritans to deliver the headspace services, but this is only through the Morrison-McCormack government providing $111.3 million to increase the number of headspace services across Australia, and I'm so happy that Kempsey is one of them. Not only is it being delivered through a $3.4 million investment; it's creating a further 10 jobs, five of which have been earmarked for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The fact is that one in four kids that walk through that door will be Indigenous.

We know how successful headspace is, but it alone cannot overcome the awful reality that one in four young people will experience mental ill health and that suicide is still the leading cause of death for young Australian people. The young people that come into headspace and similar places are there because they are victims of trauma not of their doing. They're victims of domestic violence, of sexual abuse and of exposure to drugs and alcohol at a very early age. We have to change our way of thinking and the way we act to keep those young people safe.

Good mental health starts at home. It starts with having caring families, and it starts with families taking time to care for themselves and for their children, both physically and mentally. It starts with having good access to quality childcare services and schools, and, of course, to vocational training opportunities to achieve a worthwhile job. The Morrison-McCormack government continues to work hard on all of these things, through our JobMaker plan and other reforms.

I want to take the opportunity to acknowledge the Kempsey Community Suicide Prevention Action Plan, with the project leader being the Macleay Valley Workplace Learning Centre, who, since last year, have trained over 200 people within our community in suicide prevention, intervention, crisis response and bereavement. They've also formed a successful collaboration with the Kempsey TAFE campus for work placements for students studying mental health, and they have engaged well with the Macleay community, with Macleay Valley Workplace Learning Centre staff spending time with families to hear and share stories about suicide and its prevention.

The Kempsey community is grateful, as am I, that the youth now have an additional layer of support to help them achieve a better future for themselves, and I thank this government for its investment.

House adjourned at 20:00