Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to thank the member for Mackellar for bringing forward this matter of public importance. Like her, I am a doctor and I am heavily invested in public health problems and harm minimisation in relation to gambling and obesity as well as alcohol misuse. These were problems that I dealt with on a daily basis on the frontline at the Alfred Hospital for the 13 years that I worked there and every day for the 26 years of my career as a doctor.

Just yesterday, the multipartisan health committee launched a parliamentary inquiry into diabetes and obesity. This can't happen soon enough. This will be a far-ranging inquiry, much like our long COVID inquiry was, which will delve into the drivers of diabetes and obesity. As we know, these are bedfellows. They march together. One problem synergistically interacts with the other. They are driven not just by traditional conventional health risk factors but by the social determinants of health. They are driven by poverty, poor education, financial insecurity and a lack of access to fresh fruit and vegetables. These are the factors that actually drive over half of all health outcomes, and diabetes and obesity are no different. The health inquiry that I will be part of will be doing a deep dive into the social determinants that require not a prescription pad but a parliament to solve. That's why I'm standing here in this parliament. It's one of the reasons.

There's no question that obesity is at, I would say, pandemic levels in Australia. One in four children are affected and two in three adults are affected by obesity and being overweight. So we need a holistic approach to tackling this problem. Junk food advertising is certainly something that we as a government are looking at. We have committed $500,000 to commission the University of Wollongong to look at how unhealthy food is marketed to children. I welcome that. This is in addition to the health star rating that we already have on food packaging. That is something that's public facing and at supermarkets—but it's clearly not enough.

On the matter of alcohol misuse, my observation has been that people resort to using alcohol or, indeed, illicit drugs as a maladaptive response to life stressors, acute stress or chronic stress. This is where we really need to focus on the drivers of mental health. Mental health reform is at the forefront of our government. Our budget response demonstrated that, with over half a billion dollars committed to mental health reform.

I want to focus on some of the things we are targeting in that package. One of the things we are targeting is workforce. We know that we are just simply not going to have enough psychiatrists to deal with all the mental health impacts that we have in our community. So a substantial amount of that funding is going towards supporting the training of psychologists. We have dedicated significant amount of money to upskilling the allied health workforce so that they understand what mental health first aid means. That means that we all become part of the solution. The other aspects include 500 internships for psychology trainees. We're looking at redesigning the entire psychology pipeline. It is unclear to me as a doctor why it takes six years to train up a clinical psychologist. That is the same time I spent in medical school. The problem with that is it acts as a drag on training and people drop out. You get attrition of highly skilled, intelligent, hardworking, committed students. They fall away simply because they can't deal with the duration. Six years is a long time to not be earning a decent income and to not be working. We will be looking at all of that.

In addition to that we're committing funding to 2,000 supervisors to get paid to get re-credentialled to re-enter the psychology workforce in order to supervise trainees and beef up that pipeline of workers that we need in order to support our community going forward. But that's not the only thing. There's no point even talking about referrals to psychologists unless you support the primary healthcare network. That's something that we're doing in a stunning way, by tripling the bulk billing incentive. Frankly, patients just need to get to see their GP as the first port of call. There's a lot that's going on at the table. Focusing on the social determinants of health as well as specific interventions is really important.

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