Federal election 2025: Mental health pledges won’t plug all the gaps

Monday 14 April 2025

While last week’s election pledges for the mental health sector are welcome, there are inevitable gaps that won’t be filled by the major parties’ announcements. In particular, the safety net of mental health service delivery – community-based, psychosocial supports – have been overlooked.

Australia’s mental health sector was thrust into the election campaign spotlight repeatedly last week. And while some impressive figures have been announced – $1 billion by Labor and $900 million by the Liberals respectively – both commitments would still leave significant gaps in a mental health system that has been underfunded for decades.

WAAMH’s CEO, Taryn Harvey, spoke to Paul Cook on ABC’s Statewide Drive program late last week, about the need for holistic mental health care within communities, which remains one of the biggest gaps in the sector, especially for those living in regional WA.

“Many of our members are providing headspace services or some of the new Medicare Mental Health Centre services, and so we hear from them [about] the very positive impact they’re having on people's lives,” Ms Harvey explained.

“But what I would also say, is that the gaps in mental health care are much broader than just access to clinical services, which is often what these centres will provide.

“I think particularly in WA’s regions, one of the things that we need commitment on is that people want more holistic approaches to mental health care and things that will provide support for some of those ongoing social care needs.

“And so, one of the things that we and other [peak bodies] like us have been calling for from the Federal Government, is investment in what we call psychosocial supports.”

Currently, there are 48,000 Western Australians living with a mental health challenge who need psychosocial support (such as help to pursue education or employment, build social skills or secure stable housing) to enable them to recover and stay mentally healthy into the future.

As this group is not eligible for the NDIS, these psychosocial needs must be catered for by the community-based, non-government organisations that WAAMH represents. But a historical lack of state and federal government focus (and funding) for these supports, is resulting in the psychosocial needs of many Western Australians remaining unmet. This means that mental health challenges become prolonged or exacerbated to the point where urgent, clinical support is required, often in hospitals.

This situation is not restricted to WA. This scenario is playing out right across the nation, at a time when the clinical mental health workforce (including psychiatrists and psychologists) face significant staff shortages and retention difficulties.

Pressure continues to mount, as there is increasing competition between federally and state funded support services and the private sector, for the clinical workforce. Additionally, clinical positions require significant training and development, meaning they have a long lead time. As this segment of the workforce faces growing shortfalls, there is a risk of people with mental health challenges being left without any support while they wait.

This issue prompted the Prime Minister’s announcement that Labor’s funding package, if re-elected, would include support for 1,200 new training places for mental health professionals, such as psychologists and peer workers.

At the Prime Minister’s press conference on Tuesday morning, the federal Minister for Health, Mark Butler, addressed the pressures on the mental health workforce, saying Labor was injecting record funding into hospitals and was “determined to build the mental health workforce."

Once more, the focus was largely on clinical staff and the psychosocial workforce seems to have been neglected, with no clear plan to address the shortages and chronic underfunding of that segment of the mental health workforce. The psychosocial workforce has not been included in the Federal Government’s National Mental Health Workforce Strategy, which outlines the pathway to creating a sustainable mental health workforce until 2032.

A stronger community-based mental health sector, with a psychosocial workforce that has a holistic approach to support, can help to offset those clinical workforce challenges and ensure people in this ‘missing middle’ still have support.

Ms Harvey believes that equitable funding for all aspects of the mental health system and a joint focus from the federal and state governments on community-based support services will be essential to create a sustainable system.

“Building a strong safety net for mental health service delivery means valuing the expertise of our members – those organisations that provide holistic care and psychosocial support within communities,” she said.

“We need to empower these organisations (and support them through increased funding) to do what they do best. By doing this, we will ease pressure on other services.”

Mental health remains a major concern for Australian voters, so it wasn’t surprising to see it in the spotlight, with only three weeks to go until the election.

Of course, it’s not easy to get the balance right between prevention, early intervention, community-based support and urgent, clinical care, but the longer the current imbalance persists, the bigger the gap grows.

Questions persist as to how the community-based sector can be the safety net the mental health system needs, without a significant course correction from state and federal governments.

Expectations are high (and growing) that this course correction will come from a new national mental health and suicide prevention agreement, set to be negotiated over the next 12 months.