Thursday, 10 February 2022

Youth mental health

Dr BACH (Eastern Metropolitan) (22:12): (1733) My adjournment matter tonight is for the Minister for Education. Recently the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute issued a further damning report linking lockdowns and school closures to a whole series of adverse impacts for Victorian children: increased anxiety and other forms of serious mental ill health. Suicidal ideation was referenced in the report, as were massive learning losses. It was reiterated by the institute that the greatest threat to Victorian children right now is certainly not COVID-19, it is ongoing restrictions and ongoing school closures.

So the brains trust in the Andrews Labor government got together in an effort to ascertain what to do, and we found out what the response was on 7 February—that is this Monday—when they issued a media release. I have it here. Would you believe it, the response to this extraordinarily serious mental health crisis is a new multimillion-dollar program to encourage Victorian children to walk their dogs more:

The Andrews Labor Government is giving Victorian kids more opportunities to lace up the boots, hit the dance studio or slide down to a skatepark …

Let us unpack this for a moment. The Andrews Labor government banned Victorian children last year and the year before from lacing up their boots, then it banned them from dancing, then it put enormous bollards that are normally used for counterterrorism in the middle of skate parks. These people have more front than Myer. They went on—this is a media campaign, by the way, a multimillion-dollar media campaign to encourage kids to do things like:

… walking their dog, riding to school, or kicking a football …

Victorian kids do not need another slick social media campaign from the Andrews Labor government. They are desperate to do these things. It is this government, the first government in the long and wonderful history of our state, that has actively stopped them from doing them. How about this nugget of gold:

Active Schools supports schools to take a holistic approach to physical activity—

bear with me—

recognising there is no single solution to shifting inactivity—

I am not sure what that means—

and encourages kids to be active through quality physical education—

this is all one sentence—

quality school sport, active classrooms—

I am a schoolteacher; I have no idea what that means—

active travel, active recreation and a supportive school environment.

I am not sure which Rhodes scholar wrote that, but they certainly wrote it on the fly in an effort to make it look as if something was being done to deal with the appalling mental health shadow pandemic. So the action that I seek from the minister who came up with this utter rot and piffle is for him to release to me the health advice on which this program, this multimillion-dollar spin campaign to encourage kids to walk their dogs, is predicated and the criteria upon which its success will be determined.