Tuesday, 8 March 2022

Motions

Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System

Debate resumed on motion of Mr MERLINO:

That this house takes note of the addresses given at the special sitting at the Royal Exhibition Building on 2 March 2021 for the presentation of the final report of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System.

Mr HAMER (Box Hill) (17:46): I was hopeful I might be able to get another full 10 minutes in, because it is such an important report. I was just reflecting on how it is almost a year to the day since we had that joint sitting of the Parliament in the Royal Exhibition Building not only to hear from the experts but particularly to hear from the sufferers and the people who have really been through hell and back in terms of their mental health experience. All the people who came forward for that royal commission and for the findings gave their time and particularly gave their stories with such raw honesty. I think it is to their absolute credit that they were able to do that. The work of the commission was then able to pull away the curtain on some of the mental health issues that our state is facing. Obviously there has been a lot of talk about what the mental health impact has been throughout the pandemic.

Ms STALEY (Ripon) (17:48): I rise to speak on the take-note motion on the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System. I also recollect the powerful nature of the joint sitting that we undertook at the Royal Exhibition Building and the sense of hope that so many had that the royal commission and its findings would make substantive change but also quite immediate change. I think it is appropriate to ask, ‘Where are we now, one year in?’. Unfortunately, Professor Patrick McGorry’s—who of course was intimately involved with the royal commission—assessment of the mental health waitlists is:

We know people have died on the waiting lists …

Data released quite recently last week shows that thousands of vulnerable young people are at a crisis point because they are sitting on a waiting list that has now blown out to more than 60 days before they can even get a mental health appointment. At every point we have seen that the rhetoric of the government has not matched the outcomes. No matter how much money you spend on something, no matter how much you talk about it, no matter how many inquiries you have, in the end we have to look at the outcomes, and the outcomes we see for young people is this waiting list of more than 60 days. There are 139 people on the waiting list for just one specialist youth mental health facility. At the start of 2021, 12- to 25-year-olds at Victorian Headspace centres were waiting 40 days for urgent psychological interventions. That is the list that is now over 60 days. The outcomes are just not good, and people do not have time to wait.

We have announced that if we are given the great privilege of forming government in November we have a plan to fix this mental health crisis. I am going to step through it in some detail because there are things happening in my electorate of Ripon that speak to this, that show that there are localised solutions to workforce, and because I know the government immediately came out and pooh-poohed our response because we are concentrating on workforce development. We will launch the nation’s largest ever recruitment drive to revive Victoria’s fatigued and under-resourced mental health workforce, and we have got a number of ways in which we know the workforce needs to be augmented. There just are not enough people in the mental health workforce, so we have said that we will provide financial support to attain an undergraduate mental health qualification, financial support for tertiary qualified Victorians to enter our mental health workforce and more training places for psychiatrists and psychologists so they can work sooner.

I particularly want to pick up on that point, because just in the last sitting week in the Parliament I raised a constituency question around asking for funding for One Red Tree Resource Centre. Now, what One Red Tree Resource Centre has is a master psychologist who can supervise psychology masters students as they do their placements. These people are as rare as hen’s teeth, and we are very fortunate to have one in Ripon—in Ararat, my home town. What One Red Tree Resource Centre does is it provides the placements for people in the final year of their master of psychology; they go into schools. They provide psychological assessment and assistance in schools, and they are supervised. Now, it is models like this that will allow us to implement our policy of expanding the mental health workforce. It is not a one size fits all, it is not the big existing providers, it is actually looking at local solutions like we have in Ararat. They have already got people in local schools. It is great. In fact I think all the primary schools in Ararat now have somebody working with them.

We have also said that what we will do is enable counsellors—these are already degree-qualified counsellors—to go into schools and that that will immediately add another thousand people into the mental health workforce working with young people, and that is a crisis point for our state. It is certainly a crisis point locally. I have and I am sure every other MP in this place will have heard tragic stories—and I am not going to use people’s names; I think in this circumstance it is not appropriate. But I think of one family who two years ago had a happy, resourceful, delightful nine-year-old and now have an anxious, cannot-leave-the-house, terrified 11-year-old. That family could not get a psychologist or a psychiatrist for months, and their daughter is suffering because of that. They now, thankfully, do have a psychiatrist, but it took them a long time to get there. And it is not just one story; that is a Ballarat family, and I can think of others in Maryborough and in Avoca.

I will move beyond talking about children. I have quite a lot of veterans in my community, as I am sure many others do, and many of them deal with PTSD and anxiety. The changes caused by the lockdowns and the pandemic more generally have in many cases triggered their PTSD, and yet the availability of workforce in country Victoria in terms of mental health practitioners is such that people are just not able to access the help that they need at the right time. So while I understand that the government had the royal commission—and it had many recommendations, and I will come to one of those at the end of my remarks—we have to look at the outcomes. It is not enough to say, ‘But there’s been a pandemic’. That cannot be the answer to everything. It cannot be, ‘Oh, well, that explains everything’ in the sense that it does not have to be fixed. We need to rebuild and recover this state, and there is no place that it has to start more than with our mental health workforce to deliver the services that Victorians need.

The final point that I want to cover is how this government are funding their mental health reforms. It is of course another tax. Now, I have previously spoken about why I think this tax is wrong, and there are two ways in which it is wrong. The first is of course that it is a tax on jobs. Now, every time you tax jobs, you end up with fewer jobs, and having a job is one of the greatest ways for people to have good mental health. They have a purpose, they have income, they can provide for themselves and they can afford housing and all the other things that those of us who are employed enjoy. But the other reason that having this payroll tax addition is not right, although it seems to be an increasing pattern of this government, is that this is a tax for a specific thing that should be funded by general government revenue—that is, the government living within its means with the taxation it has and then the expenditure. There should not be a special tax. You do not have a special tax for health. Why do we have one for mental health? It ghettoises mental health. I believe it is profoundly wrong to say, ‘We will fund mental health services differently to how we fund the police or health or education’. It should be the same.

Ms CONNOLLY (Tarneit) (17:58): It gives me a great deal of pleasure to rise to speak on this very important motion this evening. We have just clocked over a year since we were all there sitting at Melbourne exhibition centre listening to our Premier hand down the final report for the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System, and I clearly remember sitting there and feeling the gravity of the moment. Both sides of this chamber had come together to acknowledge the shared failure essentially of our mental health system. We acknowledged that the system was broken long before COVID-19 and that we would endeavour to fix it, and I knew then that no matter how hard the work would be, our government was determined to put that work in and fix the system—to rebuild it from the ground up.

Even before the final report we knew that this royal commission was unlike any other we had undertaken. There has always been a large degree of public interest in royal commissions, especially those enacted by the federal government. We have seen at that level how the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety has impacted conversations, particularly in the wake of COVID-19, and like aged care mental health has also become one of the most serious topics talked about around dinner tables right across Victoria and in the community due to COVID-19. But even prior to COVID it was easy to see that mental health was something that my community in Melbourne’s outer west was particularly interested in seeing addressed and fixed.

I remember in the middle of 2019 I was approached at an event by a young man. He would have been probably in his mid to late 20s, and he was at the event with his mum. I remember him coming up to me and telling me just how grateful he was that we were undertaking this royal commission. He told me and shared a little bit about his personal mental health issues, including his struggle with depression. He wanted to know how he could take part in this royal commission, how he could tell his story and where he could attend a hearing. Was there a way he could make a submission? This was really personal for him. It struck me then that this was unlike anything our government had done before, and we had of course done remarkable work when it came to royal commissions, especially when it came to dealing with family violence. But there was something about this conversation for me that said we were doing really important work. I had beside me a young man in his late 20s who had probably never paid attention to politics. He would rather be out at the pub with his mates after work than at home watching the news or writing to an MP like me, but he was paying attention to a royal commission that our government had established.

Now, if that taught me anything it was how universally important mental health is for every single Victorian. They say one in five people will suffer from a mental illness in their lifetime, and this of course affects more than 20 per cent of people; it affects families, friends, workplaces and the wider community. What that means is that by resolving to fix the system, as we have done, we are committing to improving the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions of Victorians. In the wake of COVID-19 this has never been more important, because we are not denying that the last two years have been difficult for many people in our community. We all know they have been really difficult. Like many others in this place I too have taken so many phone calls and I have spoken to so many people in my community about them struggling with their mental health over the past couple of years, whether it was mums at the end of their tether doing remote learning at home with their kids while trying to work or people in the community who had in fact lost their job as a result of the pandemic. People were really struggling.

My community was one of the hardest hit by COVID. In the second wave Tarneit and Truganina, postcode 3029, was the epicentre in Australia of COVID-19 cases. Mine are a community that already struggled with insecure work, and they could not work from home. They were on the front line. My community is home to young families and people working in retail, in hospitality and in child care. We have small business owners in their thousands and warehouse workers, and the pandemic affected all of them. My electorate has nearly 30 schools—that is a lot of schools to visit—with staggering numbers of schoolkids. It is a community where there are, I think the number is now, about 110 babies being born each and every week. The last two years were not easy for them. Mental health has absolutely been a key issue for families right across the Tarneit electorate and indeed the whole of Victoria.

The royal commission has made 74 recommendations for our government—and not just our government but future governments—to act on, which will take steps forward to fixing our broken mental health system. Like the Premier said just over a year ago, no matter how hard it is, we are determined to implement each and every one of these recommendations in some form or another. That is a huge commitment to Victorians. We have already seen action being taken in the last year alone with over $3.8 billion invested into mental health services in last year’s budget. This is the biggest spend on mental health in any Australian jurisdiction—any Australian jurisdiction—and I think that reflects just how serious this work is and the need to get it right. With these investments we have made progress on more than 85 per cent of the recommendations. We are trying to roll this out quickly. More than a third of this reform package will be delivered by the end of this year. It will not happen overnight but change is coming, and I feel really proud to be part of a government that is willing to go ahead and make it and invest in the change that Victorians are desperate to see in this state. It is a very, very extensive program, I have to say.

We are making sure that every secondary school and specialist school in the state has a mental health practitioner to help young Victorians. We did that last year, an entire year ahead of schedule. Like so many colleagues here in this place, I have been out and about at local schools lately, and I have met lots of those mental health practitioners. They have been doing an incredible amount of work with our secondary school students.

We have started building six new local adult and older adult mental health and wellbeing services in six LGAs, including in my community in Wyndham, and we are building on this by opening another 21 right across Victoria. I was very pleased to hear that in our patch in Wyndham we are not only going to be getting one, we are actually going to be getting two of these new mental health hubs. There is going to be one in my patch, in Truganina, and there is going to be one in the member for Werribee’s electorate, in the heart of Werribee. I know that the member for Werribee does share my excitement that these vital services will be operating in our communities and delivering the mental health services that we need. In addition to this we are also opening another 25 mental health and wellbeing hubs across the state in each and every region, so anyone can get the quality support that they need regardless of their postcode, meaning all Victorians will benefit from an additional 93 000 hours of mental health support.

There is so much that is being done—too much to go ahead and list in the 90 seconds that I have got left—but these investments are not just good for our mental health system, they are really good for the Victorian economy as well. They are going to be creating jobs and skilling up people to go ahead and work in our mental health services. Ensuring a strong mental health system is not only good for Victorian workers and their employees, but these investments we are making into the system are going to create thousands of jobs and create opportunities for Victorians of all ages to pursue a career in mental health.

It does give me a great deal of pride to stand here and acknowledge the tremendous work that our government has done in addressing Victoria’s mental health needs a year on from handing down the report into Victoria’s mental health system. It will of course take time, but the failures of the system are too grave and too serious to ignore. The impacts of our actions to fix the system will be felt right across Victoria, including in my own community in Wyndham, in Melbourne’s outer west, and we are also going to share in the benefits of a stronger, more effective mental health system. With a third of these recommendations to be fully ticked off before the end of the year, I look forward to returning to Parliament next year, if re-elected, to continue our government’s great work on rebuilding Victoria’s mental health system.

Ms WARD (Eltham) (18:08): Now, the member for Ripon raised a few points in her contribution to this debate, and again I find it quite astonishing that there are those opposite who like to pretend that there is actually nothing happening by this government. We know that this is a government that does make things happen. This is a government that says something and then does it. One of the things I do want to highlight and take a moment to discuss from the contribution by the member for Ripon is her point that, firstly, this government is stigmatising mental health issues through how we want to pay for all of our mental health reforms. There is not a government in the country that has shone a light on the challenges facing people with mental health issues as this government has. There is no other government that has shone a light on the failures, and the needs of people with mental health challenges, as this government has done. So to try to pretend—and it is a pretence—that this is a government who wants to stigmatise people with mental health issues is nothing short of ludicrous, because the actions speak much louder than any of the words the member for Ripon could come up with. This is a government that says something and then acts on it and makes it happen, and that is exactly what we have done in responding to the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System.

Like the member for Tarneit, I do remember that day at the Royal Exhibition Building. It was quite amazing. It was really quite amazing. And again I think that this highlights the inaccuracy of much of the member for Ripon’s contribution. A government that wants to stigmatise mental health does not create a parliamentary session in the Royal Exhibition Building with people making contributions, talking about their experience with mental health challenges, talking about what this means to them. This was one of the biggest days in our parliamentary history. This is a government that is shining a light on this issue; this is not a government that is stigmatising it. So I would urge the member for Ripon to actually be accurate with the language that she uses in this place and talk about what this government is doing rather than her misleading way of suggesting that we are behaving in a way that we are not, because it is completely inaccurate to say that we are stigmatising mental health.

So the member for Ripon is avoiding the reality of what is happening around us. This is a government that is absolutely getting things done, and this includes in our response to the challenges that people in our community are experiencing with mental health issues. Those opposite can pretend that nothing is getting done, and we know it is a pretence. It is not the reality. We know that this will take time. We have got generational mental health challenges that this government is working towards addressing. We have got our stolen generations, and we are making determined steps to help them address not just their mental health challenges that have come from being dispossessed and removed from their families. We are embarking on a treaty process with our Indigenous people. We are compensating them for the loss, the grief and the challenges that they have experienced. This is intergenerational mental health challenges that people can experience. So yes, the last two years have been incredibly difficult for people and the mental health challenges that people have faced have been absolutely traumatic, but this government is looking across the board. As I say, it is those people who are experiencing mental health challenges today, but it is also people who have experienced intergenerational mental health challenges, like our Indigenous peoples.

So with this report what we are going to see is 10 years worth of reforms, but we are already acting on it. In a year we are already acting on it. We are already underway on acting on 85 per cent of the commission’s recommendations, and in the budget we delivered last year we have committed $3.8 billion towards rebuilding our mental health system. That is not stigmatising mental health. That is actually saying, ‘This is a serious issue that we need to put serious money behind’. We need to support these people, and that is exactly what this government is doing.

Let me just go through a little bit of a shopping list of the things that we have undertaken. We have started the process of the new mental health and wellbeing act. We have released a new strategy aimed at increasing our mental health workforce, and so far we have created more than 350 positions, with thousands more to come. And let me just do a little bit of a sidestep here, because do you know what else this government has been doing? Creating free TAFE. And what are the courses that you can study at free TAFE? There are a lot of courses that this government is supporting with free TAFE, and that includes mental health, that includes mental health peer work, that includes alcohol and other drug certificates and it includes youth work. So, again, to say that we are stigmatising, that we are not doing anything, is not correct. It is not correct. Across departments, across portfolios, this government is putting things in place that will help people address the mental health challenges that they face.

We have opened 25 mental health and wellbeing hubs across the state, providing an additional 93 000 hours of support. We are working to establish six local adult and older adult mental health and wellbeing services, and once they are open in the second half of the year we will bring the support that people need much closer to their families and community. We are working with the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation. We have started a new scholarship program, and the new Aboriginal social and emotional wellbeing centre of excellence is being established. We have passed legislation to establish the Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing. This centre will be the engine room for the transformed mental health and wellbeing system, bringing together people with lived experience, researchers and completion. We have also completed the statewide expansion of the hospital outreach post-suicidal engagement, or HOPE, service from 12 to 21 Victorian locations.

That is just a brief snapshot of all the things that this government is doing, so again for those opposite to pretend that nothing is happening, that this is an empty space and that this government is stigmatising people with mental health issues, is wrong. It is absolutely wrong. This is a government that is going about on the front foot to put serious money behind these serious problems.

There is no doubt in the last two years people have had traumas that they have never experienced before, and this is one of the reasons why we are investing so heavily in support services, why we are training people. You cannot actually deliver services if you do not have people with the qualifications to help them with their challenges. We need free TAFE, but we also need our federal government to step up and stop making university so expensive so we can have even more trained people. So let us stop importing labour; let us actually train and educate people locally so that they can help address these challenges. We are creating the workforce that will be able to respond to these needs, something those opposite find quite foreign—actually creating work. Government intervening and creating opportunities—who would have thought?

I do want with the little time I have got left to talk about a recent announcement in the north-east which is just fabulous. It is just fabulous. The Premier came out to Macleod last week and announced that a statewide child and family centre will be built in Grieve Street, Macleod. One of the really lovely things about this announcement is that it is embedded in community, that it is embedded with other neighbourhood homes. It is a part of a suburb. It is a part of a community, again refuting the member for Ripon’s claim that we are stigmatising people with mental health. We have created a home for families who are experiencing mental health challenges that they can go to amidst neighbours, in a neighbourhood. This will be the first of three new facilities to be built in Victoria as recommended in the royal commission into the mental health system. This site allows it to blend in with the neighbourhood, and it also allows for a greater sense of privacy. And it has great access to public transport. Macleod is a lovely suburb; it is a contained suburb. It has a beautiful village feel. It is an excellent place to locate this facility. It will have 12 beds over three residential facilities, housing a maximum of three families at any one time. It will be staffed 24/7, and children and families who stay at the centre will be able to attend day programs and receive outreach support. Staff will be able to support those staying at the centre during typical family routines such as mealtimes and bedtimes.

This is important support, this is real support and this is long-term support. This is the kind of support that helps families transform themselves and change their experiences, change how they go about life, change how they live. This is a really, really important facility and should not be undermined by petty political game playing by those opposite, who want to actually add to people’s trauma, who want to make them unhappy, who want them to feel that they are not supported, when the truth is they are deeply supported. There are so many platforms that this government has put into place to support people experiencing mental health challenges, and it is wrong for those opposite to trivialise it with their pointless political games.

Ms COUZENS (Geelong) (18:18): I am pleased to rise to speak on this take-note motion on the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System, and can I start by thanking and congratulating the previous Minister for Health and the current Minister for Health and of course the Premier, who initiated the royal commission into mental health. I am really proud to be part of a government that has put these significant reforms in place. As the member for Eltham has just said, we are the first and only government to have done this in this country. We all know that our mental health system was broken, but the challenge was and always has been: how do we fix it?

The royal commission has listened to people with mental health issues, their families and the experts and has come back with the 74 recommendations that we had presented to us in March 2021 at the Exhibition Building. I think everybody on this side of the house most certainly was so proud of that moment because we knew exactly what that meant. We knew what it meant for Victorians, but we all knew what it meant for our own electorates as well. It has now been 12 months since the royal commission handed down its final report and clearly indicated that the system was completely broken. So we know that. You have just got to look at the report to understand what has happened throughout Victoria.

Prior to the outcome of the royal commission I often met with people with mental health issues and their families and heard shocking stories, as I think many of us did—stories of how they felt so left behind in every aspect of their life. It was a great privilege for me to hear those stories, and then once the royal commission started people were coming to me more and more and telling me about their stories. We of course encouraged them to submit to the royal commission inquiry. I remember one young woman who was at the time in the Swanston Centre mental health unit. She was very young—she was 18 or 19—and had an eating disorder, and she wanted to tell me of her experience. I was allowed to go into the mental health unit to meet her and have a chat to her about her experience. She made it very clear that obviously the system was broken, that there was nothing for her and that the culture within the mental health system was a part of the problem and that had to change. I always remember that young woman and what she said to me because it was just so relevant when we look at what came out during the course of the royal commission.

That royal commission undertook community consultations and public hearings. That included 1600 people, 61 sessions at 21 different locations, 3267 submissions, 19 days of hearings and 3000 respondents to the community survey. So people certainly stepped up in this state to put their views forward and to also share what they thought was wrong with the system and how it needed to be fixed. As I mentioned earlier, the report was handed down in February 2021, and there were 74 recommendations in some key areas. The final report recommended a new approach to mental health and wellbeing. Well, we knew that that is what needed to happen. It recommended a collaboration to support good mental health and wellbeing, promoting inclusion and addressing inequalities. It outlined the fundamentals for enduring reform and transforming the system with innovation and implementation. It also set out a 10-year vision for a rebalanced system where mental health and wellbeing treatment, care and support are provided in community hospital and other residential settings, and it sought to rebuild the system from the ground up with communities at the centre. That was really clear to all of us on this side of the house.

As a result of the royal commission report, I have to say the work that has been undertaken in my electorate of Geelong is absolutely incredible. People are really surprised in the community by the work that is being done. We know that the workforce is a huge issue and we need to grow that. Over the past two years we have committed $269 million to increase that workforce. As the member for Eltham said, our free TAFE courses are contributing to that. It is going to take time, but we are building up that workforce. We did a major upgrade to the Swanston Centre inpatient unit, that very place where I went and sat with that young woman with the eating disorder. Now that is far better than it was before and there has been an expansion of different services. We have the mental health Hospital in the Home care. We have a purpose-built mental health and drug and alcohol hub currently underway, being built in central Geelong, in Moorabool Street. What that will mean for people with mental health issues is that they will be able to walk in there at any time and get the support they need, and that is one of the things we heard during the royal commission. But I heard that as a local member. People said to me, ‘We didn’t know where to go. You would go to the hospital, go to accident and emergency and wouldn’t get the services that you needed’. Now, once that opens, which will be a bit later this year, people will be able to walk in off the street and get exactly what they need. This is a huge development. People are just over the moon in Geelong about the fact that there will be somewhere you can just walk in and get the support that you need. We also have expanded HOPE, the hospital outreach post-suicidal engagement program. It started off as a bit of a pilot and has grown, and we have now expanded that in Geelong and I believe in other areas because it works and it works so well.

The Strong Brother Strong Sister support for Aboriginal young people was something that we really needed in our community. Back about 18 months ago we know that there were a number of young Aboriginal people who took their own lives. The great thing was that we stepped up and put something in place, and that Strong Brother Strong Sister service is now providing that and has been funded since then to continue to do that work. We have also funded the Aboriginal-controlled organisations, and in my electorate Wathaurong Aboriginal Co-operative have been funded to deliver mental health support. It has been amazing support for Aboriginal people in my community. We have a large population of Aboriginal people in the Geelong region. In fact it has grown more than Melbourne’s population has, so we know it is a growing population.

We have funded the mental health support through Ermha, which is based in northern Geelong. We have supported Haven mental health accommodation in Geelong. Youth beds will provide that inpatient mental health support that young people need and that we do not have at the moment, and they are actually being built as we speak. The other big one for us is the early parenting centre. Parents who are struggling with their new babies, for example, will have an inpatient service that will provide all the support that they need, and that is currently under construction.

So we know what the issues are; we know the work that has to be done. Around 85 per cent of those recommendations have been rolled out across Victoria. This has been huge. Other states, Labor states, are now looking at what Victoria has done and looking at doing similar sorts of things, because we know it works. The consultation with people with mental health issues has been extraordinary, and it is because of them we have got such amazing facilities being built. At the moment we have got the acute mental health facility that is being built, which came as one of the interim recommendations. That is currently being built. It is almost completed. It is going to be amazing for those people, and it was done through consultation with people with mental health issues to make sure we got it right, because the important thing is that we do get this right. I am so proud of this government. I am so proud of what we have done and continue to do. I commend this.

Mr TAK (Clarinda) (18:28): It is always a pleasure to speak after the hardworking member for Geelong. Having had the benefit of working with the member for Geelong in other committees, I know that she fights very hard for especially regional mental health issues in her community. And it is special also to follow the member for Eltham with her compassionate and passionate contribution. It is a very important motion here today, because mental health is challenging for all of us and almost half of the Victorian population will experience mental ill health over their lifetime. For the 50 per cent that are lucky enough to escape mental illness, they will almost certainly have a loved one, a family member or close friend that is affected, so this affects us all in very real and very meaningful ways.

We know that the current mental health system has failed to support those that turn to it—a broken system—and we know that we have to do better. So the government took action and committed to establishing a royal commission into Victoria’s mental health system as an election commitment prior to the 2018 state election. The response from the Victorian community was immense, with the commission receiving more than 12 000 contributions. I think it is a testament to just how much of an effect mental health issues have on our community, and I thank each and every contributor for sharing their experience and knowledge.

Like the member for Geelong, I have mentioned that there was an outpouring of emotion across the community. The royal commission received some 3267 submissions and was conducted over 19 days of hearings with almost 100 witnesses. Outstanding—3267 submissions is immense. Again I would like to thank everyone for bravely sharing their experiences and personal stories. Sometimes it is very difficult. I would like to take this opportunity to share a few of those stories to try and amplify them in some small way.

Rafi was 17 years old living in Melbourne when he told his family overseas that he was gay. In Rafi’s words:

I was battling with my depression, and then I came out with my sexuality. I was born into a Muslim family, I left the religion, and I came out with my sexuality. So these two things turned everything upside down for me. My family disowned me, threatening to kill me.

Rafi’s family stopped supporting him financially, and he became homeless. The threats intensified, and he said he felt helpless. Rafi experienced trauma and mental health challenges from an early age. When Rafi was admitted to an emergency department after attempting suicide in Melbourne he said that the staff did not believe what he was saying about his family, the threats and the punishment he would experience in his home country. He also reflected on the cultural difficulties he faced while he was receiving treatment, care and support. He recalled:

Doctors used to talk in front of me as if I don’t know any English. I’m not good at English, but still, they used to talk in front of me as if I don’t know any English.

I did not eat hospital food because I didn’t grow up eating pork and things like that. I had a different food.

Rafi said that the doctors contacted his family overseas against his wishes and told them about his mental health challenges. He also said that staff planned to return him to his family until the Department of Home Affairs and a psychiatrist intervened. Rafi described the importance of that intervention:

If that senior psychiatrist had not trusted me, I would be dead today.

So this is very powerful, and imagine how many thousands of similar experiences there are. I wish I could revisit them all, because they are so compelling. In my personal life I know a few of my friends that have grown up and did not know until we all became adults, and then things started to open up.

Another example: Katerina Kouselas. I may have pronounced her name incorrectly. Let us call her Katerina. Katerina’s husband, Bill, died by suicide in 2016, and she believes that the mental health system failed him. Katerina recalled:

Bill had depression for nine to ten years prior to his death, but we had no experience of the mental health system until the six months before he died.

Katerina described how Bill had been receiving treatment at an adult prevention and recovery care service but how he really struggled when he was released. Before his death Katerina took him to an emergency department. She recounted:

In all our years of marriage I had never seen him like that.

…

People who are suicidal should not be in emergency with all the people with broken legs, you should be in a specialised area.

Katerina also described the loss of her husband as isolating, but she said that by contributing to the royal commission she hoped to make a difference to someone else in the future. She stated bravely:

We had been married for 32 years when Bill passed away. I will never come to terms with it …

…

I just hope that by talking about Bill, and by talking about suicide, it might help even just one other person. I hope that it helps to fix the system that let Bill down, a system that is letting other people down too.

Therefore it was a long two years for the inquiry, and as you can see, the royal commission engaged extensively in gathering evidence to inform both its interim and final reports. The final report delivered 65 recommendations for an accountable and effective system that supports the mental health of our community and individuals. The recommendations delivered some strong messages, such as the need to redesign services and move from a crisis-driven model to a community-based one that delivers a better outcome, focusing on ensuring that treatment, care and support is available and accessible to all Victorians, no matter their background or their need. I think the two personal stories that we just heard and shared touched on this recommendation: moving away from the crisis-driven model and ensuring accessibility for all.

So as a government we will continue to do everything in our power to address the seriousness and the wide spread of the mental health challenges that we face here in Victoria and across the country. Therefore we saw in the last budget a once-in-a-generation investment to rebuild our mental health system from the ground up—some $3.8 billion to transform the way mental health support is offered in Victoria for all Victorians, with early intervention, dedicated streams of care for kids and the recruitment of thousands of new workers and another investment of $954 million to deliver 22 reformed areas of mental health and wellbeing services to replace the current services.

We have done a lot, but we can do this, and we can do it together. We can rebuild our mental health system, changing the way that we view and respond to one of the greatest challenges in our time, protecting and promoting mental health for all Victorians, which is very important. I am very pleased to have been able to stand here once again to speak on this motion.

Mr RICHARDSON (Mordialloc) (18:38): It is a real privilege to rise to speak on the take-note motion. Can I first acknowledge my good friend and parliamentary colleague, the member for Clarinda, for that moving contribution. It means different things to different people, this important take-note motion, and I think that contribution was absolutely outstanding—well done.

I want to go down a pathway on two things. One is, I guess, the personal experience of mental health and wellbeing and then the prevention and investment space, which I think has been caught up in the taxation discussion that we have seen—and the member for Ripon probably erred in the description of where the mental health and wellbeing reforms take themselves. I want to bring this analogy to the attention of the house, and maybe we can have a little more compassionate debate around mental health and wellbeing and how this is funded over the next decade. In the last decade we have lost 2627 Victorians to road trauma. In that same time frame we have lost 6320 Victorians to suicide. The registration charge in Victoria has a clear delineated charge across all Victorians who drive that underpins an insurance scheme, the TAC, something that has become the bedrock of a no-fault scheme that has underpinned the health and wellbeing or recovery, or in tragic circumstances the loss of life, that we experience in road trauma. It has underpinned the support for families or those recovering in the years to come. I see this levy as no different to that: an investment in trying to deal with such a devastating trauma—to think that 718 Victorians have lost their lives in the recent figures reported in the fact sheets of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System. So where you see a broken system, as has been acknowledged and as is underpinned by the 85 recommendations and the subparts that underpin the learnings and the investment that needs to be made, the levy makes sense, because more of the same will lead to more trauma. It will lead to more Victorians losing their lives, and indeed these are preventable deaths.

We think of mental ill health as a tragedy, but it is a preventable tragedy. We need to do more as a community. We are not stigmatising mental health. Like dealing with road trauma and like pushing forward to try to eradicate the devastating challenges and impacts of losing lives suddenly on our roads, we are actually bringing the investment into sharp focus for all Victorians. We are actually saying that this government, your government, is committed to making generational change to make sure that if even one person is supported and saved, then that is a really important outcome. I am sure that the coalition would not suggest that we would eradicate the TAC charge. It has underpinned insurance schemes, it has underpinned health and wellbeing and recovery, and in the devastating trauma of losing someone on our roads that no-fault insurance scheme has been a bedrock of Victoria’s system for some time. This levy, I see, is no different. It is an investment in the future, in mental health and wellbeing and to lower the devastating mental health toll that hurts and impacts so many.

If I cannot convince the coalition on that frame to be more compassionate and think of this as a long-term, year-on-year investment, then let us look at the economics. In the prevention space a dollar spent on mental health and wellbeing, according to the evidence taken by the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System, could be a $9.29 investment. Universal primary prevention programs targeted at parents could generate that kind of return, a one-to-nine return, because we know the acute stage is where a lot of the investment is channelled. We need to be starting from when kids experience mental health and wellbeing challenges in our kinders and through our schools and making sure that they are equipped and empowered in their mental health and wellbeing journey and that they can get the support early on to make sure that more do not end up in the acute phase.

The economics of this as well makes sense. We have an extraordinary number of Victorians providing care and support for families, for loved ones and for friends. Sixty thousand Victorians care for an adult living with mental ill health and around 9000 of those are young carers. I have had the chance to meet some of those remarkable young Victorians in my role as Parliamentary Secretary for Schools. You see these people putting their ambitions and their aspirations on hold to provide that care, love and support for someone close to them. It was estimated by the commission that $3.7 billion of unpaid care is provided in Victoria. When you see this through the prism of compassion and you make the analogy with the impacts of the road toll and when you look at this from an economic standpoint, it makes sense.

But then we think that one in two people will experience mental ill health. We have all been touched by tragedy or known someone who has been impacted, or maybe we have experienced our own mental health and wellbeing journey for whatever reason—whether it is ongoing or a long journey. As someone living with anxiety, that is my journey, living with that each and every day and being aware to be present. And to do the best you can each and every day—it goes up and down depending on circumstances—is to understand your journey and your place. I have been empowered to be able to do that; I have the resources available. But if you are struggling to make ends meet, if you are a single-parent household, if you can barely clothe your children or you can barely put food on the table, you will not be able to access that support, whether it is private or whether it is public.

That gets to the nub of prevention. We need to be able to support and empower every Victorian on that journey. I am a big believer in positive psychology and that we are all on a spectrum from negative 10, which is really at the debilitating end, through to 10 if you are up and about and doing really well in your mental health and wellbeing. We move along the spectrum throughout our lives. Some will be in that acute phase for an extended period of time. We have all got an investment in our own mental health and wellbeing, and we need in our education system to empower that thinking. The investments that have been made by the Premier and Deputy Premier in the education space, the mental health and wellbeing practitioners in our secondary and primary schools and in our specialist schools, really are cutting-edge policies in that space, because what we are doing is breaking down the barriers. We are destigmatising mental health and wellbeing and knowing that every single person, every single Victorian, indeed every Australian, has a role to play in supporting their own mental health and wellbeing—and a community that supports all those around them as well.

So that is the really critical element. The prevention space is where we get the biggest benefit, where we empower Victorians to get that care. Just like the prevention of family violence space, we then see the ‘now’ and the acute phase, where we have got people who are living in really debilitating circumstances and who need that care and support now, and devastatingly they are falling through the cracks day in, day out as we get on with this big repair agenda and build a system that takes time to get to that stage.

But we are on that journey of reform and empowerment, and that is something that we can all be very proud of. This does not have to be a partisan thing. We have started the prevention of family violence journey. It will be decades in the making. It is the same with the mental health and wellbeing journey. Hopefully, as with levies like the TAC charge, we will look back in time and see a lowering of the road toll. One life lost is too many, but we see the benefit in road safety and prevention and the awareness in the community that has been built, and we have got to a point where all Victorians have an understanding of road safety and risk and the impacts of trauma. I do not think we can say the same thing about mental health and wellbeing, despite nearly triple the toll and despite all the impacts that we have.

So the notion that this is not an investment in Victorians, the notion that the levy is something that should be found in existing revenue, goes to perpetuating the same problems that we have experienced already. That has already been tried. The former mental health minister, the member for Albert Park, led hundreds of million dollars worth of investment, and it did not change the dial. We did not see any outcomes. It was not a lack of effort. It was not a lack of will and determination from the Andrews Labor government. It was because there was a fundamentally broken system that needed substantial reform to get it right and get it right now for generations to come. When the levy is attacked and then diminished into an infrastructure-type cost discussion, it diminishes the mental health and wellbeing reform agenda, it diminishes the work of the royal commission and it cheapens this Parliament.

Everyone sat down the road and acknowledged that this was a really powerful and impactful moment, so let us embrace it as that. Let us not make it partisan, because governments change over time, as we know, and throughout history. This will be an obligation that all governments in the future must prioritise at their epicentre because there are over 6000 Victorians that we have lost this decade and that toll has not reduced anywhere near what we would have expected. Every single mental health and wellbeing life lost is preventable. When we look at it like that and we fund it accordingly, we will save more Victorian lives. I am glad to be in a Parliament and in a government that is making those landmark reforms to save Victorians into the future.

Ms KILKENNY (Carrum) (18:48): Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this debate on the take-note motion on Victoria’s mental health system. Of course it was the Andrews Labor government that promised Victorians it would hold a royal commission into Victoria’s mental health system, and it is this government that has promised and committed to implement every single one of its recommendations. It is this government that is delivering the biggest social reform in our state’s history by investing in the mental health system that Victorians need and deserve.

All of us know someone who has struggled with mental health, and yet we know that unlike other health issues, whether it is cancer or cardiovascular disease, mental health illness often does not get the research or investment that is deserved or warranted. All jurisdictions now have a role to play. As the member for Mordialloc highlighted, this has significant flow-on impact socially and economically. It cuts across every single aspect of our lives.

I recall last year that the federal government finally committed to some investment in mental health and suicide prevention, and of course we all welcomed that announcement and that commitment. But what we really need is a national approach to tackling this issue. We are forging ahead here in Victoria, and we are forging ahead because we are absolutely committed to fixing what we now know is a broken system. The royal commission delivered its report to us, and, as I said, we have committed to implementing those recommendations.

I remember back in 2018—it was election day—I was at a polling booth at my secondary college, Carrum Downs Secondary College, and a mum actually stopped me at the polling booth and wanted to pull me aside to talk about mental health. It was the mental health of her young daughter—10 years old. I will never forget it. She told me that she felt like a failure as a mother because she could not help her 10-year-old. She did not know how to help her 10-year-old. She did not know how to access the services to help her 10-year-old. She knew that her 10-year-old was failing, and she was watching her 10-year-old get worse and worse and worse. I remember making the promise to her at the time that we were going to do everything to fix the system, to help her daughter, to help other children—other 10-year-old children as well—to help those families who felt like they were being failed, to help those families who did not know where to turn and to help those families because helping those families helps us all. When someone is suffering from a mental illness, it impacts not just those people. It is a collective responsibility—a shared responsibility—and when people get better we all benefit from that.

The next year was 2019. I hold an annual writing competition, and one of the entrants was a year 6 student who wrote really passionately about mental health and the need for better mental health services close to home and ones that included her family. I remember reading it thinking, ‘This is so insightful for a year 6 student’. I did not know it then, but she herself was suffering from mental health issues, and it turned out the following year she was actually admitted for really intensive treatment. I had a very long conversation with her mother about it. But what was really important was that this year 6 student—she was only 11 years old at the time—was speaking from lived experience, and what became really, really important then was the voice of those with lived experience in helping reform our mental health system. That is something that the royal commission has recommended, and it is something that this government is absolutely delivering on. It is why this government is now building Victoria’s new mental health system, and we are building it from the ground up.

As we have heard, it was just over a year ago that the royal commission delivered its report, and it did so at a very historic joint sitting at the Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton. It feels like a lifetime ago, I have got to say. I cannot believe it is only a year ago. It was certainly a very powerful moment, it was a moving moment, and frankly it should have been a moment above politics. We heard from the royal commission chair, Penny Armytage; Professor Pat McGorry; and some really inspirational people with lived experience. I think none of us were left with any doubt whatsoever that the inescapable truth is that Victoria’s mental health system is failing. It is failing Victorians, and it is costing lives.

I want to acknowledge the work of the commission. I want to acknowledge all of the ordinary Victorians who contributed to the process, whether it was in written submissions or as witnesses at forums, community sessions and round tables. All of them have contributed to making this system better, and all of them have helped inform the commission’s report. That report is visionary. It is a 10-year blueprint that is really going to set the framework for rebuilding our mental health system, where we want to make sure that every Victorian gets the mental health support they need when they need it and where they need it—close to home. But it needs to be tailored support as well, whether that is early intervention, whether that is through the middle stages or of course whether that is at the acute end.

As we know, the Victorian budget last year included an absolutely historic $3.8 billion investment to start rebuilding our mental health system from the ground up. We are going to deliver more community-based services, more help for those with acute needs, as I said, more early intervention, and importantly a really new, dedicated service to support our kids and our young people. All of this has to be underpinned by a massive boost to our mental health workforce, because they are our most valuable assets in all of this. We will not be able to deliver this reform, these services, if we do not have the people to deliver it. Part of the recommendations and the strategy is of course delivering on that workforce for the future.

But we need to protect it. We need to protect the mental health reform, which is why we introduced a levy late last year. We introduced a levy by legislation to apply to businesses with more than $10 million in wages nationally. This is I believe about the top 5 per cent of businesses. We did this because it is absolutely critical that that funding is protected to enable us to deliver this massive reform. But let us not forget that it was those opposite that opposed this levy. They opposed the protection of this funding for our future mental health system, and frankly that does say something about their commitment to mental health reform in this state. It says something about their commitment to the mental health of all Victorians. It says something about their priorities. And I certainly will continue to remind my community that the coalition opposed the long-term protection to help us rebuild Victoria’s mental health system. I will remind the mum who stopped to talk to me at the Carrum Downs polling booth. I will remind the now probably year 9 student about what those opposite are planning to do.

We know if they had the chance, they would cut mental health funding. That is why they do not support the levy. We know that they will cut it. They do not want to see it protected. And this is despite the unambiguous finding of the royal commission that the mental health system is absolutely broken and that people are suffering because of this—particularly including our young people. It is shameful that those opposite could even for a moment consider cutting this absolutely critical funding that is going to change lives and save lives, so I will remind my community about that. I will also remind my community about this government’s priorities—about wanting to change lives, to fix lives and to save lives. Only Labor will deliver on all of the interim and final recommendations of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System, and only Labor will ensure that Victorians have the mental health support they all need to continue living important lives.

Mr STAIKOS (Bentleigh) (18:58): It is indeed a pleasure to make a brief contribution on this take-note motion on the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System. I know as members of Parliament, as local MPs, we often get many different people visit our electorate offices on many different issues, and for me every time I have had a visit from a constituent on a mental health care issue it has stopped me in my tracks. I have met parents of children who have, sadly, suicided. I have met parents who just want their children who have some mental health care issues that they are dealing with to have the best possible care they can and have been often frustrated by some of the roadblocks that have been in place.

I know that before the 2018 election, when our Premier announced that a re-elected Andrews government would establish an Australian first in the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System, I thought of all of those parents that I had met over the years, because I knew that this was one announcement that would change lives. I also know that over the years the stigma around mental health has started to recede, and may it continue to do so.

Recently I was at the opening of a health and wellbeing facility in the Bentleigh electorate carrying the name of Danny Frawley. Our government funded that facility—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! I am required under sessional orders to interrupt business now. The member may continue his speech when the matter is next before the house.

Business interrupted under sessional orders.