Some years ago, I saw a guy called Barry Walsh talk about his experiences in providing mental health professional development for American police officers. There, like many places, police are often the first on the scene when someone is seriously distressed but, as we’ve heard our own officials point out, police are not mental health specialists.
Barry is a mental health specialist and his speciality is profoundly distressed people at serious risk of hurting themselves. He’s a good person to explain why someone might be in a position to want to hurt themselves, and how to respond. Barry told us the police he trained, like most people hearing what we know about things like self-harm, felt both more confident and compassionate after being armed with a little bit of psycho-education.
The internet tells me that our own police all receive training, including a biannual refresher on understanding and responding to people in distress, with a focus on empathy and communication. Great stuff. I’ll come back to this.
It wasn’t coverage of what was in the 2025 Budget I noticed most, overshadowed as the spending was by the backscaling of pay equity to pay for it. It was what wasn’t in the Budget. No crowing over whopping resources for mental health, step-change investment for building both a fit-for-scale mental health workforce or targeted investment for mitigating the factors that exacerbate mental distress. If you look through press releases on the Budget, mental health is mentioned twice.
First up, thanks, Matt Doocey, for putting up your hand in the Budget smackdown to ask for an extra $7 million a year to support a bigger rollout of police and mental health practitioner co-response callouts.
That said, I’m looking forward to more detail because what we were told left me a little puzzled: “The package includes increased funding for psychology internships, stage one psychiatry registrars and peer training. Money is also set aside for security for up to 12 smaller emergency departments that require security and support.”
It’s not entirely clear to me how mental health callouts are supported by more funding for psychiatric registrars and intern psychologists, unless the idea is to put them in the panda for a ride-along.
There’s also an additional $50 million (held in a tagged contingency fund) for “improving the safety, privacy and dignity of mentally distressed people at mental health facilities”. This is a welcome and logical response to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. Again, it’s not clear exactly what it will look like.
There’s also an extra-budgetary allocation of supporting additional demand for Forensic Mental Health Services by expanding capacity in the midland region. For the uninitiated, “forensic” means “in a legal context”, so we’re talking about offenders with mental health needs and possibly offenders placed in specialist forensic psychiatric units. Any money for this is welcome and important – we’ve known for decades that a disproportionate number of people who receive the attention of the constabulary have greater-than-average psychiatric needs. But again, no details.
The announcement says that this will be paid for by reprioritised existing funds. From where? It’s not like there’s a lot of money sloshing around in the health or mental health budgets.
Why do I sound so Scrooge-like when the Budget identifies at least two new funding initiatives? First, because we have urgent and pressing need to fix things like our youth mental health, and these initiatives are a drop in the bucket.
There were many larger-ticket items in the list: $200 million for co-investing in new gas fields, more than double the spend on mental health.
I’m feeling cheated. I listened to Doocey in the lead-up to the 2023 election, and I thought he might have some substance. Maybe he has the experience to understand the challenge, but he clearly hasn’t got the vocal projection of his louder-shouting colleagues.
