PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS
Mr PIKE (Bowman) (11:11): Of course, mental health and suicide prevention should always be a national priority. Around one in five Australian adults experience mental ill health in any 12-month period. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, over 40 per cent of Australians have experienced a mental health issue at some point in their life.
More than 3,300 Australians die by suicide each year. That's around nine Australians every single day. Men account for more than three-quarters of suicide deaths.
Australians in regional and remote areas and Indigenous Australians continue to face significantly higher rates of suicide. Unfortunately, what we've seen through the Closing the Gap statistics is that the rate of Indigenous suicide in this country is trending in the wrong direction. And the broader stats around suicide deaths in Australia have not improved this century.
It's simply not good enough. It's important timing for this debate this week, because this month is, of course, Mental Health Month. It's Suicide Prevention Week, and we will celebrate World Suicide Prevention Day and R U OK?
Day on Thursday. There will be many events in this building and many stakeholders moving around the hallways of this building, in this space, this week. We also had, on Friday, the meeting of the state, territory and federal health ministers and mental health ministers to try to progress the development of a new five-year national mental health and suicide prevention agreement.
Unfortunately, we're hearing from a lot of stakeholders who are concerned about the lack of speed and the lack of ambition in those new agreement negotiations. I'll read from the communique from the Health Ministers' Meeting that occurred on Friday. In relation to the National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Agreement, it says: Health Ministers … discussed the next National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Agreement … Ministers acknowledged the valuable contributions from the sector and people with lived experience.
Ministers agreed to continue working together on the National Agreement for further discussion at their next meeting in December. This meeting will include representatives from the Mental Health sector. Now, that does not sound to me like a very ambitious agenda; that sounds like a very routine communique.
It doesn't sound like we're hearing, from the health ministers and the mental health ministers, a determination to try to lower those statistics and to try to properly tackle this important issue. We've got to achieve a system that works. Australia needs a system where people can get help regardless of their postcode, where people with complex mental illness can access adequate treatment, where suicide prevention programs are properly evaluated and where governments are independently scrutinised.
The key point that I want to make is that spending is not the same as success. The Australian National Audit Office has examined Commonwealth suicide prevention policies and has found serious shortcomings. It found that national suicide reduction objectives have not been achieved, monitoring was incomplete and the department did not have a proper framework to measure the impact of Commonwealth suicide prevention investment.
That is the fundamental problem with this motion. The government lists the money spent, programs announced and centres opened, but the real measure of success is are suicide rates falling, can Australians get care where they need it, are people with serious and complex mental illness getting enough support, is access to support improving outside of our major cities and can the government demonstrate which programs are actually working?
Australians need a system where success is measured by outcomes rather than just expenditure. The government can't keep making announcements, cutting ribbons and pretending that the job is done. A new front door is only useful when it opens into a system that is working.
Unfortunately, under this government, what we have seen is a cut to Medicare subsidised psychology sessions from 20 to 10. They've eliminated the independence of the Mental Health Commission and the Suicide Prevention Office, so now we have a situation where these important offices are marking the government's own homework. They've created uncertainty around research and community funding and they've largely rebadged coalition programs, rather than delivering substantial reform.
When in government, the coalition expanded headspace to more than 150 centres. We funded the Head to Health network of community based adult mental health services as part of a $2.3 billion national mental health and suicide prevention plan. Labor, of course, subsequently renamed these to the Medicare Mental Health Centres.
The coalition also established the National Suicide Prevention Office, which is an entity which has now been rolled into the department. We have a long way to go to achieve a mental health and suicide prevention system that works for all Australians, so we can't pretend that the job is done. I encourage the government to redouble their efforts to ensure we deliver a new national agreement that actually bridges the gaps we are seeing, rather than delivering more of the same.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Buchholz ): The time allocated for this debate has now expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.