Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Standing Committee on Education and Employment I present the committee's report entitled Work wanted: mental health and workforce participation, together with the minutes of proceedings and evidence received by the committee.

Ordered that the report be made a parliamentary paper.

by leave—As many as one in three people have or will experience a period of mental illness in their lifetime. This is reflected in the fact that 30 per cent of people on the disability support pension have a mental illness. This is not the first report to note the entrenched stigma surrounding those with a mental illness. Nonetheless, the committee was struck by how pervasive stigma remains. Our leading recommendation is that the Commonwealth government coordinate a comprehensive, multifaceted national education campaign to reduce the discrimination against people with a mental illness in Australian schools, workplaces and communities, with inclusion of less well understood mental illnesses such as psychosis.

National antidiscrimination campaigns in other countries have succeeded in raising awareness, countering stereotypes and changing attitudes about people with mental illness. Engaging employer associations and employers is a core component. Evidence also points to the benefits of prevention and early intervention. The early psychosis prevention and intervention centre—EPPIC—model was exemplified by Orygen Youth Health and headspace. All help young people with a mental illness succeed with their studies and employment. The committee recommends extending the Commonwealth government's KidsMatter Australian primary schools mental health initiative into high schools because adolescence and early adulthood are where mental illness often first presents, so support is critical.

Students with mental illness need to be supported in tertiary institutions as well. The committee notes both the increasing workload placed on disability liaison officers and the growing number of students with mental illness in tertiary institutions. It is important that educational leaders, rather than leaving these matters to student services, acknowledge the issues and dedicate resources towards the support and teaching of other relevant staff to assist students with mental illness.

While social enterprises and schemes such as supported wage systems have their place and certainly help some people enter into employment, the goal should be that people with mental illness engage with the open employment market. There are a range of supports which already exist to help job seekers and employers alike. Commonwealth government initiatives such as JobAccess, the Employment Assistance Fund and Job in Jeopardy appear to be under-utilised and need to be promoted more widely, especially amongst employers, for greater take-up.

The committee heard much evidence from the supply side of the equation on this issue but less from employers. Employers that participated in the inquiry provided some model workplace strategies for both employing and retaining employees with a mental health condition and, importantly, for looking after the mental health and wellbeing of all employees. Working with employers to promote the business case for employing someone with mental illness needs to happen more in both the public and private sectors. The Commonwealth Public Service is a major employer and should take a lead in this area.

The complexity of the Centrelink benefits system for disability support pension recipients and its interaction with employment services are repeatedly referred to in this report. Assessment processes need to be streamlined so that they are compatible and consistent across the board. A communication strategy which places consumers and the people who work with them at its heart is integral to ensuring that the needs of clients are met. The system must encourage and engage rather than discourage and disengage job seekers. Participation requirements need to be sufficiently flexible for people to venture into employment without the fear of losing their benefit entitlement and in the knowledge that there is a safety net for them should a job not work out.

Employment service providers which specialise in serving clients with mental illness need to be recognised for the qualitative as well as the quantitative results they produce. Disability employment service providers should be required to demonstrate their expertise in helping people with a mental illness find meaningful employment, education and training opportunities, and this should be recognised in the disability performance service framework and star rating system.

One of the main messages to come out of the inquiry is the importance of fostering case coordination and leveraging collaborative partnerships between government and other service providers. To this end, the committee has recommended that the Commonwealth government be always in partnership with the states and territories through COAG to support the individual support and placement model and other service models which integrate employment services with clinical mental health services.

I think that for too long employment services, though they have been solid, have sat separately from clinical mental health services. But this committee saw some models in which NGOs are partnering with state-based mental health services to bring employment and clinical services together. We have seen this happen in a number of ways through the headspace model, and the committee feels strongly that this is the direction which needs to be pursued in the future.

Clearly, a third of people with mental illness being on DSP and not working is an economic impost. There are workforce shortages in parts of the country which need to be filled, and there are economic and social benefits in greater inclusivity generally, not just for people with mental illness. In the current climate and into the future workplaces need to be more—not less—flexible, adaptive and innovative in their approach to retaining a healthy and vital workforce.

It is the committee's hope that this inquiry contributes to a national conversation here in Australia and that it empowers people to feel confident in talking about the issues. Discussions need to involve the public, private and community sectors, educational institutions and employers together with individuals with a mental illness, their families and their carers. The statistics are such that, even if we ourselves do not experience a mental illness, we will certainly know someone close to us who does. It is in everyone's interest to help job seekers with a mental illness secure sustainable employment. They want to work, and work is part of their recovery—and this report shows that there are ways for them to find work.

I thank all the people who provided evidence to the inquiry. We had a lot of very brave people who told us their personal stories, and I thank them very much. I also thank organisations which gave up a lot of time to provide us with submissions and evidence. I thank my deputy chair—the member for Grey—and all the other members of the committee. This inquiry spanned a significant period, and their commitment to the inquiry was very impressive. I thank the secretariat, in particular Sara Edson and Glenn Worthington. This inquiry has been complex and was long in the making, and their work to ensure that we got the information we needed and so could produce this report was very much appreciated. I commend the report to the House.

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I thank the member for Kingston, the chair of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Employment, for presenting this report, Work wanted: mental health and workforce participation. She has encapsulated much of what the committee has been about so far. It has made unanimous recommendations. I would also like to thank all those on the committee who have worked so cooperatively together on what is a fairly large report which took up around 12 months of our lives—I have not checked the dates. In some ways it has not revealed anything we did not know. Many of the things that we state in the report are obvious but, I think, worth getting on the record.

These are not direct quotes but rather my thoughts on the matter. Many people operate in the workforce and cope with the stress of mental illness with their fellow workers not knowing anything about their issues at all. For others, employment and mental illness are an impossible mix. The loss of employment, or the inability to engage in it in the first place, because of mental illness is a debilitating barrier which can lead to disconnection from society and exacerbate the original condition. The cost to society of this disconnection is far higher than the cost of positive programs to engage these people. Those things are given but they were confirmed by the inquiry.

However, there were some things that were not, perhaps, quite so obvious, and we have had the opportunity with this inquiry to get them on the record. The widespread ignorance of services available to people with mental illness while they try to cope with finding and holding work was a surprise to me, at least, and possibly for those of us who, as elected members, deal with constituents coming to us on a regular basis with many of the issues that were raised during the inquiry. I do not think my understanding of the way the system works is all that strong. If my understanding of it is not all that good, considering the position I am in and the resources I have at my service, then it must be darn near impossible for many people dealing with a mental illness. The sheer complexity and overlapping of the support system are overwhelming for those who are not well and dealing with a host of challenges on a daily basis.

Most encouragingly—and this was perhaps one of the finest parts of the inquiry—we found a number of progressive businesses which are implementing programs to promote a flexible and proactive working environment for workers with a mental illness. The important point here is that they are not doing it out of some sense of obligation to society. They have these proactive policies because it is in their business interest. That is the greatest message of the report: employers that have the positive programs were telling us that the loyalty they receive from a worker that they make some allowances for, and offer a flexible workplace to, more than repays their investment—in fact, these are some of the most reliable workers. They are the most committed and most likely to stay at the company for a long time and, considering the retraining expenses of companies, this is an important thing. I think that is the best message we can sell: there are people out there who know how to do this. We just have to get the message out and say, 'It is positive for your business to engage people who may be suffering a mental illness but may indeed become some of your best employees.'

The report recommends that the government support many of the great organisations that work in that space—organisations like Beyond Blue to name just one—and should, as an employer, set an example for other organisations and private enterprises to follow. It also makes recommendations dealing with the internal processes of government departments and the skills needed to deal with this vulnerable sector of society and access their untapped potential. It makes recommendations in regard to the educational institutions and recognises that mental illness typically arises in the first 25 years of a person's life, is often episodic and is best dealt with early.

Many of the things in the report probably restate the obvious—some of these things we already know—but it has brought together a broad range of experience and I hope that it will benefit all in the future of policy formulation in this area. I would like to echo the chair's remarks about those who contributed to the inquiry. I thank them for their time and their frankness with the inquiry. I would also particularly like to thank the secretariat—the long-suffering Sara Edson and Glenn Worthington in particular—for their support and professionalism throughout the inquiry.

Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Does the member for Kingston wish to move a motion in connection with the report to enable it to be debated on a future occasion?

Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the House take note of the report.

Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The debate is adjourned. The resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.