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The Health Wrap: Voting for health, a mental health focus, celebrating NAIDOC Week

Kellie Bisset
Sunday, July 10, 2016

The Health Wrap

This fortnight’s Health Wrap is compiled by Ellice Mol, Digital Communications Manager at the Sax Institute. Enjoy the Wrap and tweet us via @SaxInstitute if you have any ideas for future issues.

Voting for health

Australian voters stepped out of the barbie queue and into the voting booth last weekend to decide the leader of Australia’s 45^th Parliament. But after a marathon campaign, answers to the question of which side Australia wanted its bread buttered remained elusive. It took a week until the outcome was clear enough for Labor Party leader Bill Shorten to concede defeat, but votes were still being counted as he gave his concession speech on Sunday and it was not yet known whether the Coalition would be able to form a majority government. As we await the final outcome we look back at the recent coverage of health, a decisive issue during the campaign.

This Croakey article summarised some of the winners in this election with a special mention to Linda Burney, the first Indigenous woman elected to the House of Representatives. Meanwhile Senator-elect Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party said it would push for a royal commission into climate science and Islam as part of an extreme policy agenda, the SMH reported. And LGBTI groups said the results of the election showed majority support for same-sex marriage, according to The Guardian.

But in the end, it was the future of Medicare that dominated headlines, prompting Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to go on record saying the Coalition must rebuild public trust on the issue. He also called Labor’s ‘Mediscare’ campaign a “grotesque lie” but at a later news conference he conceded that there was “fertile ground” for Labor to sow the seeds of the campaign, Croakey reported. This piece in the Conversation examined a history of Coalition ambivalence towards universal health insurance, and Opposition health spokeswoman Catherine King made the point in this Croakey post that the 2016-17 budget under Turnbull and Treasurer Scott Morrison also saw the extended freeze on Medicare rebates and cuts to rebates for pathology and diagnostic imaging, among other measures.

Croakey moderator Jennifer Doggett criticised mainstream media coverage of ‘Mediscare’ in this post, introducing an outline from Medicare expert and medical billing company founder Margaret Faux on the intricacies of the Medicare payment system and why moves to privatise it were of concern.

And another Conversation article made a point about the Medicare election day text messages that caused such a furore: we should have seen them coming.

Meanwhile, both the Grattan Institute’s Stephen Duckett and former Howard Government adviser Terry Barnes offered their advice on health in open letters to Malcolm Turnbull in the Australian Financial Review. Duckett offered some suggestions as to how the Coalition might elevate Medicare into Liberal Party DNA as it had done with private health insurance, while Barnes said it was time to look for a newcomer into the health portfolio.

On Sky, new AMA president Dr Michael Gannon said he thought Health Minister Sussan Ley had some good ideas and was disappointed the electorate did not hear more from her during the election campaign.

In The Australian (paywall) meanwhile, the issue of raising the Medicare levy to address sustainability issues was once again put on the agenda and Treasurer Scott Morrison was reported as warning that despite its popularity, Medicare could not become a “money pit” for taxpayer funds.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and organisations also took to Twitter during the election campaign to raise priorities and encourage voters to consider Indigenous concerns when voting, using the hashtag #IndigenousVotes, as documented in this Croakey piece.

While the remaining election candidates awaited their fate, this Croakey article urged decision makers to focus on ‘ideas about how political and policy processes could operate more effectively to tackle the widening gap in the health of Australia’s most disadvantaged people’.

A mental health focus

Mental health was also a focus of Croakey’s election coverage, with Labor committing to an $84 million plan that included a 50 per cent suicide reduction target and the Coalition announcing a $192 milion plan for a number of new policies, including a new text-based suicide prevention initiative, prior to the election. Part 1 of Croakey’s pre-election mental health wrap fleshed out the key aspects of the Labor and Coalition policies. In part 2, Sebastian Rosenberg, Senior Lecturer, Mental Health Policy, Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney, provided an analysis of the major parties’ policies, saying both Labor and the Coalition were committed to backing regional suicide prevention trial sites.

Chris Pycroft, Co-Convenor of the NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby, explained why a plebiscite on marriage equality would be harmful, divisive, costly and unnecessary’ and posed a real risk to the mental health of LGBTI people, in this Croakey article.

With the final outcome of the election delayed, concerns about urgent funding and policy gaps to deal with suicide in Indigenous communities were raised in this Croakey report.

Meanwhile national youth mental health organisation headspace was in the news with the resignation of its CEO and five board members due to policy changes in mental health services announced by the PM last year.

This ABC News article is a great read, and describes the struggle of former boxer Doug Mooney who has used the sport to grapple with his own mental health issues and is also mentoring struggling young Indigenous men, and helping to get them ‘out of the quicksand’ they are in by providing them with boxing as an outlet.

On the related issue of mental health for Indigenous Australians, new research led by the Sax Institute and published in the MJA found that nearly one in five parents or carers of urban Aboriginal children suffered a high level of psychological distress.

“While it’s clear that improving the mental health of parents and carers of the next generation of Aboriginal young people must be a priority for closing the gap, existing research indicates that Aboriginal parents often feel unable to access mental health services for fear of their children being removed,” said the study’s lead author Dr Anna Williamson.

The findings are the latest to emerge from a long-term study called SEARCH, which is an active partnership between Aboriginal community controlled health services and researchers to produce data that can guide policy and lead to improved services for Aboriginal people.

Support services

QLife – 1800 184 527 or online chat (3pm to midnight AEST)

Lifeline – 13 11 14

Beyondblue – 1300 224 636

Celebrating NAIDOC week

As NAIDOC week celebrated the theme ‘Songlines, The Living Narrative of our Nation’, Croakey published this timely interview with Ngarluma and Yindjibarndi man Clinton Walker who talked about fostering connections to culture and country with the aim of reducing incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Sydney-based intern Dr Talila Milroy also wrote in this Croakey post about ‘every day closing the gap’ and the critical importance of respecting diversity in health care.

John Gilroy, ARC Research Fellow in Indigenous Health, Disability and Community Development at the University of Sydney, voiced frustration over the lack of transparency of the agency overseeing the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), arguing that it may not meet the needs of Indigenous people with disabilities.

For all things NAIDOC and to catch up on things you might have missed, you can also head over to the NAIDOC website. There were many interesting news stories during the week – too many to list – but this article about North Queensland police officers swapping their traditional police uniforms for ones with Indigenous artwork for the first time to celebrate NAIDOC week is worth a read. And you can read the ABC’s coverage of the national NAIDOC awards here.

And more

US author and poverty campaigner Linda Tirado wrote this piece for Croakey on her experience of being in the eye of a media storm after writing about living hand-to-mouth in a wealthy nation. In the wake of their shared experiences, she has teamed up wtih Duncan Storrer, the man who dared to raise the question about equity on the ABC’s Q&A program, to launch the Rise And Be Heard project, which invites people to pose questions to politicians online and demands answers on poverty.

Over 50 public health organisations have signed up to an initiative called Australia’s Health Tracker that records Australia progress in terms of preventable chronic diseases. The first report card shows Australia is one of the worst countries for obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes as well as a record high suicide rate, Croakey reported.

We also heard this fortnight that the ABC’s Catalyst program is under review and reporter Maryanne Demasi suspended from on-air assignments after an independent investigation found the controversial episode on potential health risks of Wi-Fi breached the ABC’s editorial standards on accuracy and impartiality. The SMH and a number of other media outlets covered the story.

Other Croakey reading you may have missed this fortnight:

Election news and analysis