Fiona Martin (Reid, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Select Committee on Mental Health and Suicide Prevention, I present the committee's interim report together with the minutes of proceedings.

Report made a parliamentary paper in accordance with standing order 39(e).

by leave—After 20 years of practising as a psychologist I have never seen the need for mental health services in Australia. Mental health challenges for Australians have become the norm. The system is strained. The pandemic, the bushfires, the floods and then the COVID recession have increased the pressure on the sector, which was already in need of reform. The emergence of COVID-19 reminded us of the importance of mental health and suicide prevention as a national priority. It's been described as the shadow pandemic, but no matter the name we cannot ignore the crisis which lies before us.

On 10 December 2020 the House of Representatives resolved to establish a Select Committee on Mental Health and Suicide Prevention. The terms of reference highlighted significant reports recently completed and work underway. The committee was tasked with inquiring into the current mental health system and its capacity to respond to events such as the pandemic and bushfires, as well as a range of matters beyond the scope of earlier reviews and reports. There have been significant efforts made by government and non-government bodies to respond to the increased demand for mental health and suicide prevention services over the last 12 months and more. There have also been increasing calls by industry, consumers and carers for national reform to the sector.

On behalf of the committee I would like to thank the Productivity Commission, the Department of Health and the National Mental Health Commission for their evidence at the opening public hearing. This provided insight into government-led initiatives and reporting gaps, informing the work of the committee moving forward. Through this initial phase of the inquiry, the committee has noted several themes: workforce, including workforce capacity concerns; the role of professional bodies and the need for multidisciplinary teams; the coordination of funding of services and outcome measurement; accessibility and affordability concerns, especially for at-risk groups; early intervention, including stepped care, telehealth and digital health services; and stigma as a barrier to accessing services. We also thank the individuals and organisations who have contributed submissions to this inquiry.

The committee will now move into phase 2 of this inquiry. Let me assure stakeholders that the committee has heard their concerns and acknowledged the sector's desire for government to implement change. Reports, reviews and strategies are essential tools, but we must bring the community with us to drive change and improve people's lives. The committee, having considered these government reports and strategic reviews, will now look to identify those areas that need further attention. We will engage with stakeholders across the country through a series of public hearings to listen to views from those who are on the front line providing services, innovating to meet challenges, lobbying for change and training the workforce not only of today but of tomorrow. I would like to thank the secretariat, for the long hours and hard work they have put into the committee to date, and also members of the committee themselves. The final report is due in November this year. On behalf the committee, I commend the interim report to the House.

Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I want to thank the member for Reid, the chair of the committee, for her work, and other committee members and the secretariat for producing this interim report on mental health and suicide prevention in a very short time frame. This has been a challenging committee because of the time frame, but we have had the benefit of many reports written prior to our meeting: the Productivity Commission inquiry, the National Suicide Prevention Adviser's report, the Victorian royal commission report and the National Mental Health Workforce Strategy. They have informed the place we have reached in the interim report. We have had the opportunity to take into account the 2019 bushfires, which hit my local community so badly, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic.

We all recognise that the need for improved mental health services was evident well before we went through bushfires in my community, followed by flood, then COVID and then another massive flood in March, which is going to have long-term mental health impacts. We knew there was a need, and there are important issues raised in this report—one of which is around affordability, which the committee considers to be a significant and ongoing barrier to accessing mental health services in Australia.

I want to give an example from my own community. I have young people who limit their psychology or psychiatry appointments because they have to pay up to a $200 gap fee each time, or they miss out altogether and don't even start their treatment. I have parents who don't have private health insurance and can't afford the private residential programs for their kids who are suffering eating disorders. They really consider themselves at the mercy of an under-resourced public health system. These are some of the issues that we as a committee have taken evidence on. Just last week I spoke to a mum whose daughter has an eating disorder. The very best advice they can get from any doctor anywhere in Sydney is to go to England for treatment. That's the state of services available to people not just in Western Sydney, but in Sydney. We know, as a committee, that we need to improve these things.

I know that, as a committee, we will do our best to provide good advice. But, as good as our reports may be, we need not just this report or more reports, but for those reports to be actioned. What's needed is services on the ground, and certainly in the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury we need specialist services that are accessible to people—young people, old people, anxious people, psychotic people, people with complex mental health needs and people needing early intervention.

What is needed is more capacity for the Blue Mountains satellite headspace, for example, which, since it opened, has had 80 per cent of its clients reporting suicide ideation. I've been very grateful to my local services for providing submissions to this committee for the second stage of our reporting. I think my engagement in the committee shows that I am extremely motivated to be involved in any useful decision-making process about where investment in mental health services should go, and I obviously welcome any investment in additional services.

But I do stand here today asking a question that people of the Hawkesbury are asking, which is: why are we still waiting for a headspace in the Hawkesbury? The last budget had funding for extra headspaces, and we didn't get one. Young people have been waiting and waiting; their parents have been waiting and waiting; their teachers have been waiting and waiting. I think that urgency, the need for it, comes through in our report. We really do feel that these reports need to be actioned. What we really need in the Hawkesbury is a key coordinating place with a no-wrong-door policy for young people to walk in and say to someone who will understand, 'I need help'.

In lieu of those things happening, as a committee we have been encouraging our grassroots community organisations to make submissions to this inquiry. I've had the opportunity to work with a group of young people right at the grassroots. They have been doing amazing work to develop their own way of reaching out to their peers to get them to talk about their battles with mental health, partly addressing the issue we raise in this report around stigma—one of the key themes that comes through in this report—and I look forward to helping them launch their initiative in the coming weeks. It will partly tackle the stigma associated with mental ill health and partly direct people to digital and phone support services, both of which are themes of this report.

Every one of the reports our committee has considered stresses early intervention, as the chair has said. Tackling issues when they first appear is a more effective method than ignoring them, leaving them untreated so that they compound. The committee has had the benefit of being able to hear from very wise people who've spent a lot of time working through these issues. I'm pretty sure every committee member values that expertise. Certainly the Labor members on the committee value that expertise. I'm not sure if any of the work that this committee has discussed or that the witnesses appearing before it have discussed has been addressed at all by funding the government has allocated in this year's budget, but I look forward to learning more about that.

I do want to touch on one last point in our interim report, and that's telehealth services. This report recognises just how useful an expansion of telehealth services, and the take-up by consumers, has been during COVID. There is no doubt it has saved lives. But if you live somewhere like the Macdonald Valley—which has faced flood and fire; where the landlines go down, sometimes for weeks; where there's no mobile coverage, and the latency of the satellite via the NBN means it's not filling that gap—you can't actually access those services. So, when we think about mental health as a committee, we can't see it in isolation. We need to make sure the services that are available are accessible to everyone, one way or another, wherever they live. I look forward to our committee finding a way to really add value to the work that the committed experts in the field are doing, and have been doing for many years. I thank them all for being involved with our committee, as they have been with so many other inquiries in the past. I look forward to doing further work with a very dedicated team to get some action here.

Debate adjourned.