Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Hanson for raising the very important issue of the mental health and wellbeing of Australian citizens and the difference, in particular, in numbers of men who are successful with suicide than women. That has been the case for as long as I've been watching that data. Obviously how we deal with trying to support people who are contemplating suicide is a real focus of everybody in this chamber. It has huge individual cost, obviously, family and friend cost and also significant costs to the community.

I can go through a number of the initiatives we are funding in mental health. I wasn't aware of that gathering on the lawns of Parliament House yesterday. On the issue that you raise about better access, the issue we found with that program was when it was returned to its normal level of 10 sessions—it was expanded only in COVID for 20 sessions—per person, it allowed a much greater number of individuals to access it. It didn't reduce access. It actually increased access because what we saw was that there's only a certain number of psychologists. If they see the same patient 20 times as opposed to seeing two patients 10 times, we were able to—