Labor are digging an even deeper hole for themselves over shocking revelations they commissioned, paid for and then buried a damning report into mental health services in 2011.
While they couldn’t deny yesterday they buried the report, they have added another layer of deceit with a completely false claim in today’s Mercury that they ‘quarantined’ mental health in their slash and burn 2011 budget, despite actually cutting more than $8 million from the mental health budget.
I am astounded and extremely angry at finding out that Labor and the Greens hid from the public a report on gaps in mental health services that they commissioned at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars in 2011.
It is clear to see that Labor buried this report because it was incredibly inconvenient for them while they were preparing a budget which cut more than $8 million and 40 workers out of statewide mental health services.
The former Health Minister Michelle O’Byrne, former Premier Lara Giddings and former Deputy Premier Bryan Green are directly accountable for their government's callous action in deciding to bury this inconvenient report. If a stakeholder hadn’t put in a Right to Information request seeking the report then the public and the current government would never have known of its existence, let alone its contents.
Rather than own up to this shocking betrayal of Tasmanians with mental health issues, the response in today’s Mercury newspaper from a ‘Labor spokesman’ astoundingly claims that “the Giddings Government quarantined mental health from savings measures in 2011.” This is exposed as a lie by the Giddings Government’s own 2011-12 budget savings update which shows by halfway through the financial year they had implemented “operational efficiencies in Statewide and Mental Health Services ($8.7 million).”*
The 2011 report confirms many of the shortcomings of the mental health services system which were identified in the review report we commissioned and released last week as part of the Rethink Mental Health project. Instead of taking immediate action, as the Liberal Government is, the Labor-Green government put this report in a drawer and decided never to speak of it again.
The Liberal Government is continuing to progress a range of mental health initiatives we took to the election, including significant new funding to suicide prevention programs and other mental health initiatives, as well as new measures in the 2015-16 Budget, including:
Our comprehensive 10-year plan to fix the broken mental health system will be released in October and will detail immediate, short-term and long-term actions we will take to address the many service gaps in mental health.