Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

One of the great joys of being a member of the Senate Community Affairs References Committee is the amount of time we can devote to some of the most important issues that face Australia, and suicide prevention is by no means unusual in that sense. This has been an extraordinarily educative and at times harrowing process. Certainly it can only increase the enormous respect one has for people who live with bereavement as a result of suicide and for people who live with a mental illness that makes them consider suicide all the time.

I would like to concentrate on a couple of the recommendations. The first recommendation makes the point very strongly that the economic cost of suicide is minute compared to the social and emotional cost of suicide. But as a society we tend to notice the things that cost money. Current assessments from organisations like Lifeline and from people like Professor Patrick McGorry are that suicide costs the Australian economy at least $30 billion a year—which makes it well worth trying to reduce that rate just in economic terms. The flow-on social and economic benefits can only be wonderful for the country. We are suggesting that the Productivity Commission or an organisation such as that should look at the economic assessment of suicide and attempted suicide in Australia.

One thing I did not know until we did this inquiry was how large a problem suicide is in Australia. Professor Patrick McGorry, at a different launch this morning, made the point that it is the largest killer of people in the prime of their lives in Australia. In terms of lives lost every year in Australia, it is 40 per cent higher than the road toll. However, we obviously do much, much less about it than we do about the road toll.

As a former journalist, the other recommendation I would particularly like to focus on is recommendation 20, which is about how we go about reporting suicide and how we develop awareness of suicide. It has long been the view in Australia that reporting suicide has the potential to lead to copycat suicides, but the point is made that without strong public awareness campaigns and strong mainstream media reporting of the road toll very little would have happened to reduce the number of deaths on the roads. We have been highly successful in reducing the road toll with strong media awareness campaigns on the topic. It would be good to see the research done so that we can be confident that the guidelines that currently exist under Mindframe can be reviewed and adapted so that we do get public attention being paid to what is currently the greatest killer in Australia. On that same basis we recommend that, at least biannually, the national figures on suicide should be published. Again, stigma has prevented this from being the case. It needs to be brought out into the open now.

One fact that I did find disturbing, and Senator Siewert mentioned that we really have some problems in recording suicide and even assessing what sometimes constitutes suicide, is that we basically do not recognise the fact that people under 15 commit suicide. Those figures are not even collected as part of the statistics. There needs to be public conversation about what is a terrible tragedy and we certainly need to do something about the issue. I would very much hope that this report is widely read and accepted and that it leads to real changes in the way we deal with the question of suicide prevention.