Page 3714 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 23 November 2022
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There is so much more to be said about the work being done to support those in our community who need mental health and wellbeing, and for the boys and men in our community, but there is a time limit to this debate. Let me just say that I am committed to continuing this work through the ACT Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Plan 2019-24. I commend Minister Stephen-Smith’s amendment to the motion.
MR COCKS (Murrumbidgee) (3.42): I am going to start today by giving what is traditionally called the trigger warning. I will be speaking about very difficult subject matter. I will be speaking about suicide, and I will be talking about things which are going to cause pain.
I had not intended to speak to this motion when I entered this place today, and I thought Ms Castley did an admirable job of making the case for a men’s health plan and for a campaign. I genuinely thought this was something straightforward that we could all agree on—that we could send a message building on Men’s Health Day, and during Movember, that men’s health matters and that the ACT ought to have a plan to address those specific health issues and challenges that are faced disproportionately by men.
But then I read the minister’s amendment—an amendment that reads like a tone deaf pat on the minister’s own back; a proclamation of how well she is doing for men if only we would realise it. Now she has had the gall to resort to name-calling, casting aspersions and suggesting that this is only something that we would bring up because the conservatives want it. Well, let me say that if it is only conservatives standing up for men’s health, call me a conservative! I hate to break it to the minister, but we are not doing as well as she seems to think on men’s health. Everything is not okay. The minister’s amendment throws away the entire positive intent of this motion, and instead of acknowledging the reality, trumpets the fact that men’s life expectancy has increased by more than women’s over a 10-year period. Perhaps the minister should have a look at those numbers and realise that we are starting from behind, and that in total the gap closed over that decade by 0.2 years.
I also notice that the minister’s amendment calls on the government to continue implementing plans like the ACT Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Plan 2019 to 2024, a plan which the Minister for Mental Health has also just raised. Perhaps the ministers are not aware that the total number of references to men in that plan is one. As I know the minister understands better than most, victims of suicide are disproportionately men. According to the ABS, and reported to the AIHW in 2019, the suicide rate for men was more than three times higher for males than for females.
So let me try and explain my experiences of men’s suicide and how that reverberates, because the first time I was forced to see the deep reality of suicide was in my first year of high school, when the brother of a classmate took his own life. A young man in the middle of high school lost hope, took a gun and shot himself. Fast forward to the end of college, and that sense of freedom you get as you get your licence and discover that freedom as you begin to tread your own path. There was a period when I spent that freedom visiting a friend every day to make sure he was still alive—another young man who had lost hope and made more than one attempt to take his life.
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