Rowan Holzberger (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I spoke on this yesterday in the Federation Chamber, but I think a longer speech gives me the opportunity to go into this in a little bit more detail. On a light note, the moustache which I'm. now proudly displaying is 26 days old, I think. It's actually thanks to my friend next to me, the member for Hunter, who encouraged me to raise awareness and funds for men's health but particularly for men's mental health. If the camera were able to look around this chamber, there are three of us sporting moustaches. It's important that guys who don't normally like to talk about their health or situation feel encouraged to do so.

I guess my own experience with mental health is informed by where I grew up. I have the great privilege of representing the electorate of Forde now in Logan, in the northern suburbs of the Gold Coast, but I'm a Broken Hill boy at heart, a country boy. Broken Hill is a mining town like Gladstone. It's a mining city, actually, and it is working class to its bootstraps. The men and women out there are tough, hard-working and salt of the earth—everything that you would expect about Australians when you think about Australians. The men are tough working-class men. Even though it's 1,400 kilometres or so away from where I live now—even though the geography is different—the demography is the same. People in Forde are tough working-class people, men and women, trying to do their best, trying to get ahead and putting themselves last so often.

When I think about growing up in Broken Hill, I think of two guys who would be my age today if they were still around, but they're not still around. It's been a long time since I've been back to talk to their families, so I won't use their last names, but I'll use their first names. Anybody who knows who I'm talking about will know them—Benny and Jezza. Benny was this magnetic kid with this cheeky smile. When I became interested in politics as a young person, the New South Wales government had come to power and was cutting education. This was back in 1988. All of us who were aware of what was going in politics were getting really outraged, and somehow we managed to foment a school strike.

I remember that Benny was one of the people really encouraging me to lead the strike. Benny couldn't have cared less about politics. The last thing Benny was interested in was what was going on with student-teacher ratios. Benny wanted a day off! Benny was just this tough kid with this natural gravitas that attracted people to him. And it was because of Benny getting behind me, and pushing me, that he and I marched up to the principal and announced that we were going to have the school strike. Well, for me, it was a school strike; for Benny, it was a day off. Benny was an amazing character.

Jezza was from the same group—we were all sort of southies in Broken Hill. Jezza was a different kind of guy. If you didn't know him very well, he was a quiet, gentle bloke. But jeez, he loved to laugh, and he was the sort of mate you would go into the trenches with.

Despite how good they were, Benny and Jezza took their own lives. This is not uncommon in working-class communities, and it's not uncommon amongst men. In many ways, the only thing worse than talking about suicide is not talking about suicide. The reason why it's so important to look at the impact that it has on men is that something like 75 per cent of suicides are men. As much as it is a men's issue, the people who bring it up with us when we're going around in our communities are generally the mums, the wives and the daughters, who are concerned about their man's mental health. Men are usually the ones least likely to bring it up themselves.

It is so important for us as a parliament to do what we can as leaders in our community, but also collectively to shine a light on the scourge that is male mental illness. There are a lot of reasons for why it might happen. I think Australia was a much more egalitarian country when I was growing up in the '80s. We were more equal. There was this commitment to mateship that you don't hear a lot of these days. And I think that through the '80s—through economic rationalism, through privatisation, through chasing the dollar rather than community—we moved away from that spirit of doing things for the sake of other people, and we've been left poorer as a society for that approach to economics. When I'm talking to young people today, one of the reasons that they cite for their mental health—I mean, look at the state of housing. It's bad enough when we see it, but imagine trying to grow up in a world where this is the world you're going to come into after high school. So it's tough on kids and it's tough for other reasons too.

One of the things that I for some reason had a look at was past royal commissions. There was a royal commission into television back in the 1950s that was looking at whether there would be multiple stations, whether there would be one government owned station, whether television would run 24 hours a day, whether people would pay for licences et cetera. One of the submissions that went into that royal commission was that television would destroy communities, and in many ways they did. Television took people away from those community experiences and stuck us in lounge rooms, gathered around the box. But social media has done that on steroids. Look back at television now. At least there was some shared experience. Now we are completely chopped up into little tiny slices in our bedrooms, separated from family, separated from community, all getting some sort of message through social media. The stress that this puts on young people—and older people as well—has got to be one of the reasons that mental health is so bad, is such an epidemic in our community.

But I think that, despite the problems that exist and the problems that in many ways are getting worse, there are real solutions out there. I think the best example of that would be MATES in Construction. Some know, I'm sure, but it started somewhere around 2007 when suicide rates amongst male construction workers were way above the community average. Because of the work that they've done, they've managed to bring suicide rates down to about the community average amongst male construction workers and, the way that they're going, it's going to be less than the national average. So something is going on. They are doing something right. So often it is just one conversation that makes all the difference. It is just a few sessions with a trained professional that makes all the difference. Without having that one conversation, without putting somebody in the right direction, not having that conversation can have catastrophic consequences for the individual and catastrophic consequences for the family.

There's so much more to do. The moustache will be coming off on 1 December, but the work will continue, led by the Special Envoy for Men's Health, who we're lucky to have today—led by a position the first time that it exists in the Commonwealth. (Time expired)

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