Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to alert the House to the very concerning lack of youth mental health services in my electorate of Hotham. The mental health of young Australians is one of the most difficult and important challenges that we confront as members of parliament. To date, my community does not have the services it needs to tackle this problem.

There are 36,000 young people living in Monash today. Young people in this community who are experiencing mental health challenges must navigate a very complex system with a near total lack of integration between services. If they do successfully navigate that system and find the services that they need, they need to travel more than an hour each way to get to the nearest headspace. Today I make the formal request, as the member for Hotham, to the health minister, to fund a headspace service within the Monash council region.

Young people today face a very complex and concerning range of issues that look very different from when most of the people in this House were young. The internet has opened up a vast array of new issues, and problems like youth suicide and anxiety disorders like eating disorders continue to grow amongst young people that we represent. Today, in Monash, we are failing to live up to our duty to provide the mental health services that young people need to tackle these challenges.

Monash is one of the councils that I represent, and it is a fantastic area. It is incredibly multicultural, very vibrant and has some of the best educational facilities in the country. Whether we are thinking about the Clayton shops, where my electorate office is located and which buzz with energy, or the lively suburbs of Oakleigh and Oakleigh South, Monash is a fantastic area and a great place to live and work. But the area has some specific needs. Cultural diversity is a major factor. Because of the preponderance of high-performing education institutions, there are a lot of young people living in Monash who were not born in Australia. Many of them are attending those institutions without the support of their parents. Indeed, a study recently of students living in the region highlighted particular stresses that they face around social inclusion, managing anxiety and maintaining adequate nutrition. Within inner Eastern Melbourne, Monash has some indicators that suggest some serious disadvantage within the community. We see that this area has the highest rate of domestic violence incidents within the area and the highest rate of early childhood non-attendance. These indicators suggest how crucial it is that the young people who are living in this community have access to the mental health services that they need.

A local working group—the Link Health and Community—has shown terrific leadership in advocating for a headspace service to assist in meeting what we see is a really serious and growing local need for mental health youth services in Hotham and within the Monash region. Today, I join them in that campaign. We lack an integrated service provider, and this is one of the really significant issues. Instead, what we see in this area is a web of complex services that are not well connected, and often we are seeing young people falling through the cracks—unfortunately often the people who are most in need of these mental health services.

Today, young people living in this area sit by chance at the intersection of three large health regions—for all of which the head offices and main service provision are at a very long distance away from the city itself. After having navigated this complex system, a young person is then allocated to one of the three providers. But what we find, and what is so concerning for us, is that those providers tend to operate at the tertiary end of mental health interventions. That means that a young person needs to be at the point of having a psychiatric episode before they are eligible to be provided services through these providers. For an individual who is trying to do what we want them to do, and tackle their mental health issues early on—so we get that great payback from early intervention—we see that they are lacking the services and support that they need. What we have instead is a pretty piecemeal system that has been pieced together by a range of youth organisations and community health services. These hardworking mental health professionals meet regularly to try to manage the gaps in services that I have discussed, but it is not enough. We should not have to expect that. The young people living in Monash are entitled to have a service that caters to their needs, and today that is not the case.

For the Monash local government area, it is imperative that we tackle this issue, and I ask the health minister to consider my request and provide a formal response. I encourage greater expansion of the health-based initiative to accommodate a coordinated response for the best mental health outcomes for the young people we represent in this chamber. Thank you.