Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to thank the member for Lindsay for moving this motion, particularly at this time. Today is the first day of End Youth Suicide Week, an initiative of Youth Insearch, which works to raise awareness, overcome stigma and, hopefully, provide support to those who need it.

I've been talking with the people of Wentworth over the summer, and youth mental health is one of the most common concerns people raise with me. It's not just young people who raise it: youth mental health is frequently raised by older people, who are desperately worried about their children, their grandchildren and the young people in their communities. During the election, a number of people came up to me personally and told me about their own mental health journeys. A young man in particular came to talk to me and asked me about what I was doing in terms of supporting young men. We had a hard conversation about the impact of mental health on young men in particular, the alarming suicide rates, his own personal journey of dealing with the suicides of his friends and his own mental health. Sadly, the statistics really speak for themselves. Over the last decade, the suicide rate for people aged 18 to 24 went from 10.8 per 100,000 to 14.6, an increase of more than one third. For people in the 18 to 24 age group, suicide accounts for around one third of all deaths. It is the leading cause of death in that age group, and that is much, much too high.

The subject of today's motion is the government's decision to reduce the number of Medicare subsidised mental health sessions from 20 to 10. I have raised this with the minister directly, and I would like to thank him publicly for taking the time to meet with me to discuss this and other issues on several occasions.

As I understand it, the government accepted the findings of research done by the University of Melbourne, which found that there was a lack of equity in the Better Access initiative, with people from more affluent areas receiving more support than those from less affluent areas. Research also found that those with more complex mental health issues were not receiving sufficient support. It is quite reasonable for the government to target its limited resources to where it can do the most good. I accept that principle and advocate for it being adopted more widely, but the economic impacts and the community impacts of mental health are significant. The 2020 Productivity Commission estimated that the benefits would be more than $18 billion per year. That is more than the value of our wheat exports.

The value of effective mental health programs is enormous. The impact on our communities when a young person makes the most awful decision for them in their lives is absolutely brutal, and no money can put a value on that. Rather than cutting back on Better Access because of equity and complexity issues, we should be building on it and developing additional solutions that are targeted to those groups which are missing out, such as low-income individuals, those in regional areas and those with complex mental health conditions. Mental health support should not be a zero-sum game, where funding is taken from one group and given to another. We have to improve results across the community and find innovative ways of delivering services, rather than rationing services for some despite the positive and demonstrated impacts of that support. So I call on the government to reconsider this decision: restore the additional mental health sessions and make mental health and suicide prevention an absolute priority for this parliament.

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