Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Defence Industry and Support) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Grey for moving this motion on suicide prevention and for helping to shine a light on, in particular, the regional and rural aspects of this issue. As he has highlighted, it is much more amplified in our rural and regional areas for a number of the issues that he has canvassed and that my colleagues, the member for Lingiari and other regional members, will well understand. Isolation has a lot to do with it, but the stresses of life for farmers is also a significant factor, navigating the ups and downs of the seasons, the droughts and the more extreme weather we're facing, and then added to, I must state, in recent times by the behaviour of banks towards our farmers. I want to salute the work of Senator Williams for continuing to pursue, over the years, the banking royal commission, which is shining a light on that now. I really was inundated by complaints from the farmers in my region over the behaviour of banks, which was adding another whole layer of strain and stress to their lives.

So we know about the stresses on farmers. There are the kids in rural and regional areas who are coming to grips with their sexuality and navigating things like the recent plebiscite that we had. I've met with those kids and seen the pressures they're under and sometimes the tragic results that they have had. But there are also our Indigenous kids, as was mentioned by the member for Lingiari. I have quite a few concentrated areas of issues in my region that have, tragically, resulted in too many losses of lives amongst our Indigenous kids but also in teen suicide in general. That's why I was so proud of the fact that we were able to unite across the aisle in this parliament to form the Parliamentary Friends of Suicide Prevention, working together with my colleague the member for Berowra. When we first started that process we wondered how much we could achieve, but it really has been rewarding to see what we've been able to do—the unity we've been able to forge across the aisle, having both Greg Hunt, the Minister for Health, and our shadow minister, Julie Collins, attend a lot of our activities and reach consensus on some policy initiatives. Through that mechanism we were able to bring up, for example, Dr Duncan MacKinnon and his team from Bega. They explored a fantastic initiative through our team clinic concept, working through Greater Pacific Health down there, which addressed the real issues of why kids weren't reaching out for help and what sort of support we could provide them with to eliminate this curse. And it really works—providing that initial portal for kids to go and see nurses in a non-threatening situation, timing that with their transport to and from schools, being able to take that further if necessary, finding means to do that without any cost or charge to the kids, and then working that through with counsellors in the schools, et cetera. It's become a really successful model. I was really pleased that they were able to tell that story up here through the committee mechanism. I salute the minister for taking on the lessons from that and then expanding and funding the team clinic project through the Bermagui Medical Centre, the Curalo Medical Clinic in Eden, the Lighthouse Surgery in Narooma and the Mainstreet Medical Centre in Merimbula. The Kiama Medical Practice, further up the coast, has also benefited from this.

I'd like to see this taken nationwide using our GP networks, because they are so ubiquitous. It's been great to see what headspace facilities have done. They are a bit patchy, depending on their location and how they are being operated, and you can't have headspaces everywhere in the country. I think being able to build on this network of using our GPs and nurses to create a nationwide approach to this is a great way forward. I'm really pleased with the work that the committee has been able to do to get that policy process underway.

I'm also, though, concerned about the issues to do with our veterans in rural and regional areas and the people who are depending on Centrelink services. I know there's been a drive in recent times, everywhere, to try and create efficiencies and automate stuff, but, if you take the human out of human services, there's a problem. That's particularly amplified in rural and regional areas. If my veterans don't get a chance to speak with a person, or if my senior citizens are forced to try and deal with online services—the struggles they have dealing with the computerised services where they don't fit within boxes—it causes an enormous amount of stress out there.

Our electorate office has basically become an adjunct to Centrelink. My crew have had a lot of pressure put on them dealing with people in high states of stress and anxiety, but the work they have done has prevented a lot of potential suicides by helping people through that. I'd like for us to step back and have a look at providing better services in human services by using humans.

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