Anthony Byrne (Holt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'd like to talk about the mental health of young people in the south-eastern region. Young people have been pretty badly affected, particularly in the past, with some challenges relating to a cohort of young people in 2011 and 2012 who took their own lives. It was a very traumatic period of time for our community, and I'd like to thank Professor Patrick McGorry for the work that he did with me and others and stakeholders in the region to try and address that epidemic, if you want to use that term. At that period of time there was some discussion about the suicide rate coming down—that clearly has not been the case; the suicide rate is actually going up—given that we have headspace clinics in our region, including headspace Dandenong and, particularly, headspace Narre Warren. We have a massive growth corridor and we have a lot of young people who want to access the service, but they need another headspace clinic, and that headspace clinic needs to be put in Cranbourne. I can't go into the figures, but headspace Narre Warren has a huge number of young people who want to see them for complex needs. They need additional services. What I am doing here today, particularly given the work that we've done and the discussions that we've had with headspace stakeholders in that region, is calling for a headspace clinic in Cranbourne. We're going to lobby for this, because this is a service that our young people deserve and need.