Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

During this adjournment debate tonight I would like to talk about an issue that has been dividing Queensland's north-west. I recently visited Queensland's north-west, one of this country's most beautiful, vast and resource-rich areas. On the journey I visited communities in Mount Isa, Boulia and Cloncurry. I met people who loved their place, who were full of reasons why they live where they live.

There are issues with living up there. Up there, people pay 40 per cent more for goods, and that will rise even further with Labor's carbon tax. Some high schools in Mount Isa offer only two OP subjects. Aged-care options are minimal. There is a saying in Mount Isa: 'Get old, go to the coast.' Housing is substandard and in short supply. Mount Isa desperately needs to find $8½ million for badly needed sewerage works for the town itself. Power is even at times rationed. The lone nurse in Cloncurry is expected by her employer to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, although the community recognises that this is an intolerable burden for any one person to shoulder. There is all this when the mining areas around Mount Isa hold 25 per cent of the world's mineral wealth. Yes, that is right—25 per cent of the world's mineral wealth.

But there are some even more shameful figures that are growing worse every day as the trucks and trains with their loads of wealth head south and east, and that is in the rate of Indigenous suicide in the Mount Isa area. So far this year, 23 people have taken their lives in Mount Isa. Twenty of those who felt so bad that they chose oblivion over their country were Indigenous—20 out of 23. A social worker I met on my recent journey north went to the funeral of a co-worker last week. Her name was Yulilla Johnson. In the language of her people, the Goreng Goreng mob, Yulilla means butterfly. She was very attractive. She was beautiful. She was young. She was 19. Two more young Aboriginal women with children also took their lives that week. Indigenous Australians suffer a burden of disease that is 2½ times greater than in the general Australian population. For Indigenous women, depression and anxiety are the leading causes of their health burden. Those figures were reported in 2008 by the Institute of Health and Welfare. What is going on in Mount Isa right now, today, this very minute, suggests something even worse, with 23 deaths already this year.

I would like to tell you another story about another young Indigenous women in Mount Isa who took her life last week. I will just try to paint a picture of what it was like for her. She was married to a man who long ago had given up through depression and drank almost nonstop. All of her birth family and all of his were regularly crammed into a small, shabby house. It was an environment of constant noise, arguments, fights and destruction. She was bashed regularly. She could not remember when she had last bought some little luxury for herself. She could not even afford a woman's everyday needs. She often had no money to put food on the table. Officers from the Queensland Child Safety Services were regularly at the door accusing her of neglect but offering no solution. The Department of Education and Training wanted to know why her kids were not at school but offered no support. Queensland Housing and Homelessness Services wanted to know why she was behind with the rent but offered no solution. Once all those people had left her door, the police turned up because her eldest boy had started breaking windows and vandalising property. Then her electricity was cut off and the gas company came and took the gas bottles away. So one morning last week she walked into the backyard, grabbed the garden hose and hanged herself from the mango tree. She was also 19.

According to the most recent data, the rate of Indigenous suicide in Mount Isa in the age range of zero to 34 is 887 per 100,000. The national rate for Indigenous suicide in the zero to 34 range is 39 per 100,000. So you have 887 per 100,000 in Mount Isa and 39 per 100,000 in the rest of the Indigenous community under 34. That means that in Mount Isa Indigenous suicide is 22.74 times higher than the suicide rate in the national Indigenous population and 79.59, just on 80, times higher that an in the national non-Indigenous population. I would hope that anybody would think that those sorts of statistics suggest that what we have here is an epidemic. This situation has been known to the Queensland Bligh government for some time. People like my social worker friend and others have been begging the Queensland government for some time to do anything about it. You usually would hope that with an epidemic you get strong, decisive action. But what has the Queensland government done about it? The Queensland health minister in February gave $200,000 to the local Queensland Health regional manager to employ an external expert to 'get on top of the problem'. With 75,000 employees in the state department of health, you would wonder why they needed to hire someone from outside. But, even worse, seven months and 16 deaths later, since February, Queensland has still not employed someone who is supposed to address this situation.

This situation is not going to be fixed by a few dollars. It will be fixed by professional diligence, genuine effort and genuine care and long, slow, careful community building. The preponderance of young Indigenous people who view suicide as a viable solution to personal problems must be fixed. The silence surrounding the issue may protect those who have the responsibility for the health of our community, but that silence is not helping Mount Isa at all.

There are many in Mount Isa who claim—and I suspect perhaps with a certain element of truth—that the clamour about this in George Street and in Canberra would be deafening if it were white fellas who were suiciding. If there had been 23 suicides in Mount Isa of whites, it would not be something that I would need to raise during the adjournment debate; it would be front-page news all over the country. So keeping quiet about the numbers is not helping and treating the symptoms is ineffective. The causative factors for these suicides are drug and alcohol abuse, relationship breakdown, poor mental health, unemployment, low vocational education skills, loss of identity and inadequate communications skills. How many young Indigenous men and women need to die before the real issues are addressed?

I was pleased today to have the opportunity to speak to the South-East Queensland Council of Mayors, representing a very large proportion of the Queensland community, and raise with them the idea that it is time that local government got involved in the mental health of their communities. We saw so vividly in Queensland during the floods and cyclones that it is not the government health department that can provide the genuine underlying strength. Certainly they can provide the funds and they can look as though they care—that is always a good start. But it is in your local community that you can build the capacity and build the structures so that people feel as though there is a genuine alternative to simply walking out into the backyard and hanging yourself on a mango tree with a garden hose.

I am very pleased to hear that the Minister for Mental Health and Ageing, Mark Butler, told the House of Representatives today that he is going to Mount Isa next week. But this issue needs more than just a fly-by. It needs genuine, considered, caring action.