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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 03 Hansard (Thursday, 11 March 2004) . . Page.. 1088 ..

been in and out of the prison system for almost 10 years. Indeed, letters to the editor were headed “Community-based support is just not there”, “Quality care crucial on mental health”, “Flaw in mental health service” and “Specialist psychiatric care facility needed”.

Part of this attention is based on the inability of our justice system to handle those who are mentally ill, and we have seen, unfortunately played out in a very public way, the plight of two young women in the criminal justice system. In the case of one of these women we had the extraordinarily nasty circle at work. She has an episode, is admitted to the PSU, assaults staff at the PSU, gets hauled before the magistrate whose only choice is to send her back to the PSU, the PSU refuse to admit her because she is violent and so she ends up at the Novotel but later on ends up in the Belconnen remand system.

If this particular incident did not get the minister’s attention then perhaps he should have attended the recent mental health forum hosted by the Schizophrenia Fellowship. I notice that the minister and other members of the frontbench—the other ministers of the government—did not attend. If the minister had attended, he would have heard many tales of heartbreak from friends, families and carers of people with mental illness. Also, stories were given personally by people with mental illness. While the stories varied, they did have common themes. Without exception, they all felt this current system was letting them down. Many of them were complimentary about the efforts of mental health teams in the field and they all had useful and constructive suggestions for improvement.

No doubt the minister will soon rise up on his hind legs and say, “How dare the Liberals talk about mental health after what they did. How dare they when they underfunded the mental health system.” Let me say here and now that, yes, I believe we could have done more in mental health when we were in office but we did not have the funds because we were left a $344 million operating loss. And when we did spend we got better value for the dollar than the current government does.

As I have said, I believe we could have done more, just as I believe that the current government should be doing more. I have a news flash for Mr Corbell: the spending on mental health as a proportion of the health budget has not changed—it is still approximately 7 per cent. Let me also say for the record—and it is something for all of us here to ponder—that I am told and I believe that mental health spending should be closer to 11 or 12 per cent of the health budget to really effect change. That is the level of spending in those countries and jurisdictions that are dealing with mental health better than we are in the ACT.

I understand that that represents a lot of money but the ultimate point is that it will cost us a lot less than losing one Canberran a month to mental illness. And it is not just about the money. I know that this is a hard concept for the government to understand, but it really is about what you do with the money that counts.

I would draw members’ attention to an excellent report released recently by the Mental Health Council of Australia entitled “Out of Hospital, Out of Mind”. I will not go into it in too much detail but it does say that the post-Richmond report policy of de-institutionalisation has failed. The council says that the failure is not a failure of the policy but rather a failure of implementation. I would argue that a failure of implementation would suggest that there is a serious problem with the policy.

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