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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Wednesday, 3 March 2004) . . Page.. 675 ..

of which I am sure people are aware, in that people get the notion in their minds that mental illness means violence, which is not the case in the majority of cases.

But that is the debate we are having now. That is the environment in which people with mental illness and people supporting them have to live. I think that this is a reasonable suggestion, but it really does have to be decided by those people who have to make the decisions about policing resources as well as what is best practice in terms of support for people with a mental illness and whether they could be more traumatised by police officers in plain clothes rather than police officers in uniform because at least they know who is coming if they are in uniform.

Basically, I am saying that the issue is complex. I repeat that I think that the big issue here is the resourcing of the CAT team and why it is that police are being used as often as they are.

MR CORBELL (Minister for Health and Minister for Planning) (4.27): As Mr Wood has pointed out, the government will be supporting the motion with the amendments proposed by Mr Smyth. I think it is worth spending a couple of minutes reflecting on some of the issues this motion raises. First of all, I think that it is worth making the point that Ms Tucker raised, that is, that it is not necessarily the case that the presence of a plain-clothes police officer will automatically mean that the situation will be in some way defused.

The reality, of course, is that people who need to be taken, say, to the psychiatric services unit for assessment and treatment are frequently taken there against their will. That is a difficult situation for the officers involved, both police officers and officers of the CAT team, and inevitably can cause friction with the persons being told that they need to attend the PSU for assessment and possibly treatment against their will. It is always going to be a difficult set of circumstances.

The other point I would like to make is about the comments Ms Tucker made around staffing for CAT. The government has significantly increased resources for mental health. When we came to office the spending was $67 per head of population. We now have it over $100 per head of population. There has been a very significant improvement in the level of funding to mental health services. There has been a sustained increased of close to $4 million to $5 million over the last 2½ years.

That said, there will be circumstances where the CAT team will not be the group of people to deal with the situation completely. Certainly, they have the understanding of the circumstances and the sorts of reactions that could be expected from someone with particular types of mental illness, but at the end of the day they are not necessarily able to deal with someone who is very active physically and potentially violent. In those circumstances, it is appropriate to call the police; that is the role of the police and they work in conjunction with the CAT team in making an assessment about whether or how someone should be transported for assessment and treatment.

It is a difficult issue and it is a complex issue. Whilst I think that the intentions behind Ms Dundas’s motion are good, the issue cannot be oversimplified. For that reason, the amendment proposed by Mr Smyth is a suitable way forward.

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