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

Congratulations on your elevation, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is a privilege to rise in support of the Youth Insearch charity organisation, which is doing such wonderful work in relation to youth suicide. I'm very proud to have in the chamber with us my fearless leader on the prevention-of-suicide friendship group, the member for Berowra, who has done such wonderful work in this space. This is a very important campaign that Youth Insearch is mounting at the present time. Suicide is the leading cause of death amongst young Australians aged between 15 and 24. They're very keen to launch a campaign involving social media—obviously very effective when we're talking about this particular demographic—and they really want to get the message out that it is a serious threat, that we need to raise awareness of prevention.

Through our committee, which we've been working on for a number of years now, we've tried to emphasise the solutions out there that deal with things at the coalface. In particular we've had presentations from people like Dr Duncan MacKinnon from Bega and his Teen Clinic concept, which is proving very successful, and obviously we need to look at expanding that. But at this time, noting the Closing the Gap issue today, in my region we're dealing with a lot of Aboriginal youth suicide as well, which has a particular focus for us. Also, with these disasters that we've been experiencing, there's going to need to be a lot of effort in our region on those sorts of issues. Well done, Youth Insearch; more strength to your elbow!