MEDIA STATEMENT: HAWKESBURY HEADSPACE

Access to mental health services has been a desperate need in the community of the Hawkesbury not just now, but for years.

Over the last few days, even more evidence has been reported about the toll the pandemic and lockdowns are taking on people’s wellbeing, especially young people. Media reports this week show emergency department visits for self-harm and suicide ideation up 31 per cent for children and teenagers, compared with last year*.

Fires, floods, the first wave of COVID, more floods, and more lockdowns have exacerbated a problem that’s been around for far too long.

That’s why I can’t imagine playing politics with people’s lives and with their mental health.

That’s why I have called a spade a spade.

The likely Liberal candidate for Macquarie has dangled a Headspace in front of thousands of young people and their parents and carers for months now, just for the sake of a career.

Frankly, I’ve had enough.

My team have been talking to people in the Hawkesbury to touch base, see how they are coping, for some time now. And in nearly every conversation, mental health is raised.

We needed a Headspace before the fires. We needed it before the floods. And we’ve needed it throughout this pandemic.

Just hinting about something this government – your own party – could deliver right now, and should have delivered eight years ago, doesn’t pass the pub test.

If you’re fair dinkum, you’d get your political bosses to announce it. Build it. Staff it. Open it.

Get young people through the doors, get them help.

I have no doubt standing up for my community’s young people like this will be characterised as somehow “politicising” the issue – like that time I called for local vaccination hubs so we could have safe access to jabs, and was accused of “undermining” the national vaccine rollout.

We still need those hubs.

And I will always take up the fight for my community, particularly on mental health. The fight for access to mental health services is a personal one for me, and I have a responsibility to the hundreds if not thousands of young people, their mums and dads, their carers, their teachers and their friends, who are telling me they are desperate for this service.

This is a typical tactic of doing nothing for eight years until there’s the whiff of an election, and then rolling out promises.

The Hawkesbury deserves more than that. We deserve more than the promise of a promise.

* Source: Sydney Morning Herald, August 29, 2021.