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Focus on mental health
The government will be injecting $456m into digital mental health services – including Lifeline and Beyond Blue – to give people to with anxiety and depression better access to mental health services.
Some people go through situational distress through a relationship breakdown or a job loss or bereavement, and they need relatively short periods of support. They might not have a diagnosable mental illness, but they’re certainly distressed and they need support and that really is what the digital investment we’re looking at today is particularly targeted that there are people who go through periods of anxiety and depression and better access.
There’s definitely a gap there for people with more complex needs, but better access which is the scheme that provides Medicare rebates for psychological therapy, the one that we’re talking about, that is not designed to pick up those people and really we need to find alternative systems of support for them.
That is really the concerning growing area of need in the country, not just here in Australia and other countries as well.
They’re now close to $100 a session on average, but there’s many that are higher than that as you indicate. So affordability is a driver of inequity as well and so we’re looking at ways in which we can put out different systems for people who just don’t have the capacity to pay those sorts of gap fees.
We’ve made clear that we will always make the ADF available to states and territories when it’s needed. But we do need to have some other options in place.
We’re a lot better prepared as a country than we were heading into black summer four years ago.
At the federal level, things have significantly changed. We’ve now got one coordinated Emergency Management Agency rather than responsibilities being split between different agencies. We’ve started building a national emergency management stockpile for the very first time, we’ve got the largest fleet of firefighting aircraft that Australia’s ever seen.
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