PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS
Mr WALLACE (Fisher) (10:41): I want to thank the member for Bonner for bringing this important motion to the parliament, because mental health is a very important issue to me, as it is to many people in this country. Let me start where every member of this House can agree, and that's in relation to stigma. Stigma stops people asking for help, so reducing stigma matters.
So does encouraging Australians to check on a mate. That is where R U OK?Day is so important, but a conversation is not necessarily treatment. When someone says they are not okay, there has to be help for that person, and both people—those that ask the question and that answer the question—need to know what you do next.
More than 3,300 Australians die by suicide each year. That's nine every day. Three quarters of those nine are men, just like you and me.
Regional, rural and remote Australians and Indigenous Australians die at significantly greater rates. Let me ask the government a simple question: if we know prevention works, why is our system still built around crises? Last November, the Productivity Commission handed down its final review of the National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Agreement.
It found that what was required went far beyond finetuning. That agreement was due to expire in June. It has been extended a year, to June 2027, while a new one is negotiated.
Those negotiations are now underway. The Australian National Audit Office has told us what happens when we measure inputs instead of outcomes. It found national suicide reduction objectives had not been achieved, monitoring was incomplete, and the department had no proper framework to measure the impact of Commonwealth suicide-prevention investment.
The government's own National Suicide Prevention Strategy names prevention as the first of its three domains and sets out 106 recommended actions to address the drivers of suicidal distress. The government endorsed it, but endorsing a strategy is not implementing one. Where is the funding?
Where's the timetable? Where's the reporting? Prevention means acting on the pressures that push people towards the edge in the very first place.
Suicide Prevention Australia's community tracker, in March, found nearly four in five Australians in higher distress than a year earlier, with 45 per cent naming cost of living and personal debt as the cause. Housing, debt isolation and gambling—these are primary issues of mental health distress in Australia. In Fisher alone, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's data records 103 deaths from suicide between 2018 and 2022—103 deaths.
They're someone's mum, dad, brother, sister or child. The electorate's age-standardised rate of 11.8 deaths per 100,000 people is just slightly below the national electorate average of 12.8, but we have to remember that each one of those people are people, and there is a very, very sad story behind each one of those deaths. Prevention also pays significant dividends.
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists puts the return at up to $4 for every dollar that we invest in this space, yet this government has moved the other way. Eligible Australians could once access up to 20 Medicare-subsidised psychology sessions. Labor carved that in half as their first job in public office in 2022.
The independent evaluation of Better Access recommended that people with more severe or complex needs be able to readily access additional sessions. Labor did not deliver it. Those with the greatest need lost the treatment they had.
We've done this differently before. The former coalition government delivered the $2.3 billion National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Plan, funded 40 community based adult mental health services, expanded headspace beyond 150 centres and established the National Suicide Prevention Office, which has since folded into the department. A service can exist on a government website and still be out of reach for the Australians who need it.
Your postcode should not determine the help that you get in this space.