Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to thank a Labor minister and also to make a request. I do want to thank the Assistant Minister for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention and Assistant Minister for Rural and Regional Health, Emma McBride, for intervening when the mental health practitioner at Gundagai was going to be lost. I made an urgent request; she listened, and she acted, as a good minister should.

But I want to make sure that that position lasts longer than the 12 months that it has been given. That position is so important. Phil Gosling is doing such a good job on the ground to help mental health outcomes at Gundagai, and if that position is not maintained beyond the middle of next year then, unfortunately, many of those people are only going to slip through the cracks.

It's not good enough for a town the size of Gundagai not to have a mental health practitioner on the ground doing that valuable work. So I implore the assistant minister to make this position permanent. We, as a coalition government, put it in place. We know—everybody in this chamber knows—how important mental health is. We must make sure that we do everything we can to prevent people from, as I say, falling through the cracks. So I urge the assistant minister and the government to make this position permanent, beyond the 12-month stay that they have given it, and to allow Mr Gosling and others to do the great work that they have been doing since the coalition put the position in place.