Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Social Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'd like to take this opportunity to raise the issue of mental health and government supports in this area, with a particular focus on my own electorate of Cowper on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. Having been given the honour and the privilege on a second occasion to be in this place and having been given the role of shadow assistant minister for the prevention of family violence—and I acknowledge my friend across the table, the member for Richmond, the Assistant Minister for the Prevention of Family Violence, and I commend her on the work that she is doing, because it should be bipartisan and it should be above politics—one of my first acts in this role was to organise as many meetings, telephone calls and forums as I possibly could with local and national providers of services related to domestic violence.

Both the member for Richmond and I are former police officers and we have seen the devastation, the destruction and the ugliness of domestic violence. When I spoke to those agencies, it became very clear to me very early on that much of the funding was back-end loaded. I'm not saying that that's not the right thing to do; we need to have funding for those services that are for people who experience domestic violence and have places for them to go to escape and have ways for them to move on with our lives safely. I think successive governments have worked towards that, in terms of that back-end funding, but the service providers that I've seen locally and across the country have all noted that that problem of back-end funding without an adequate focus of effective resourcing for mental health services in prevention and early intervention is a real issue. Many of them have described it as the perpetual ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. We spend infinite time and resources on the clean-up and on helping people—and, again, we need to do that until we solve the issue of domestic violence. So it's the clean-up and the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff rather than providing the fence to protect the potential victim from falling in the first place.

At the same time that I was collating these discussions, the National Party leaders commenced their listening tour around multiple electorates, including mine, focusing on regional youth and women. In my electorate we had a women's breakfast in Port Macquarie and in Coffs Harbour, and also youth forums at Charles Sturt University. At all of these discussions—at every single one of them—the issue of the scarcity of mental health support providers and programs in the regions came to the forefront. This single issue united each different group. On paper, you might not think that they had the same concerns or priorities, but this certainly was the common thread.

One of the greatest concerns that they had was with the recent Strengthening Medicare Taskforce report. It was noted that not one mental health professional was on the task force and that the subsequent report excluded mental health completely from its findings. I don't wish to be critical, but mental health is probably the No. 1 issue in the country in terms of health. Reports have shown that over 70 per cent of GPs listed mental health as one of the top three priority areas. Now that the Medicare subsidised sessions have gone from 20 down to 10, for professionals who are seeing people with real issues, such as bipolar or personality disorders, it takes more than 10 sessions to identify this. I asked the Prime Minister to reconsider lowering those 20 sessions down to 10—to reinstate them, to ensure the mental health and wellbeing of people in our electorates.