SUBJECTS: Suicide prevention
JOHN CLEARY:
Now to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald by Assistant Federal Treasurer Chris Bowen, a man normally concerned with dry economics and the statistics of Budget chopping and giving us reasons to dislike governments for cutting out those benefits we’d most like to hang on to.
Chris Bowen found himself in the position of being challenged by the issue [of suicide] and so wrote about it in the press this week and I took the opportunity to ask him why he chose, or what prompted him, to write such an article.
CHRIS BOWEN:
Personal experience John. As I said in the article I came across a teacher in one of the schools in my electorate; full of life, passion for his kids. He used to organise the assembly’s and make them interesting, innovative events, so out of all the schools in my electorate and all the invitations I get and all the constraints on my time, I’d always try to get to this particular one because it was really an uplifting experience to see the kids so engaged and the teachers so passionate and then a few weeks ago I was sitting at my desk and I received a call from the principal, as MP’s regularly do about all sorts of issues in the community and the school community.
He told me that the teacher was dead and obviously I was surprised and then he told me he’d taken his own life which really hit me for six. It then got me thinking, and he told me some of the things in the teacher’s life which had led to it, which I won’t go in to, then it got me thinking about the issue and doing the research and it really is a big problem in our society.
JOHN CLEARY:
We’ve had the recent high-profile deaths of people like Charmaine Dragun and the actor Mark Priestly, just recently. Its high profile people in high-pressure jobs often associated with the public mind. As a politician this is something that is not unknown to politicians either. There’s been a couple of notable instances in Federal and State Parliament over the last four of five years.
CHRIS BOWEN:
Yes that’s right. It is an issue for us of course. In our line of work being in the public eye - while it has its advantages and we all know what we’re getting ourselves into – when an individual makes a mistake in the workplace their immediate workmates might know about it, their boss might know about it, but there’s no public shaming, whereas if a politician makes a mistake the whole world knows about it and the white heat of media attention goes on to them and some handle it better than others and we have had some issues in politics over recent years where this has come up, as you say, and there’s a very human story to each of them.
Politicians are human like all others and we have the same human frailty. You correctly point out a nuance to it in relation to people in high-profile public positions, whether they are politicians or others.
JOHN CLEARY:
You also have the burden of, as Assistant Federal Treasurer, being one of the hard men, being one of the nasties in the system, yet you need to keep your focus at some level on the ground to these issues, to what matters to people at heart.
How do you do it, how do you manage to keep the balance?
CHRIS BOWEN:
It’s enormously difficult, as you say, I’m a member of the Expenditure Review Committee, the Cabinet, which means any new expenditure must come before us for approval, so that’s the Treasurer, the Minister for Finance, Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and a couple of other Ministers, including myself.
You know, basically every submission that comes to us from our colleagues, from other Minsters, has merit. Everything you look at you think ‘yes, I can see he’d want to do this and we should fund it’. The stark reality is we can’t and you have to have priorities in Government as you do everywhere else. And one of the real challenges is sitting down, and say you might have the Health Minister come and say ‘we need more funding for mental health’ and I suppose my article would indicate to you that I’d be very sympathetic to that.
Then you have another Minister, the Education Minister coming to you and saying ‘we need more funding for primary schools, for the severely disadvantaged’ and, as I say, the lists go on, whether it be the Defence Minister or the others. They’re all right, they’re all valid, and it’s our job to sort them through and work out what we can do and when, that’s one of the challenges.
JOHN CLEARY:
This is where much of the discussion you raise in your article comes in about the role of the voluntary sector, the community sector.
CHRIS BOWEN:
I think the point that I was making in the article was that Government can fund more programs and we should and we are and the Health Minister’s announced some, but as a society we need to talk about this issue and I must confess John, I thought long and hard about writing this article. I thought ‘well, is it something that people will want to hear about?’ and sitting down to write about suicide is not easy, I have a fortnightly column in the Herald and it’s the hardest one I’ve had to write because it’s such a sensitive area, particularly talking about individuals, it’s a very hard column to write. But it’s important as a society, rather that as a Government, as a society we need to talk about this and tackle it because as you say, the high-profile deaths of Mark Priestly and Charmaine Dragun have lifted the issue, but how many of us realise that more people die of suicide than on the roads and how many of us realise that seven Australians today and seven Australians tomorrow will take their own life.
There’s got to be things that we can be doing, talking about it and looking out for the early signs. I don’t want to say that they can all be avoided because they can’t. Suicide’s been around forever and there’ll always be suicides but surely if, as a society, we recognise that we have an issue, as we’ve recognised with the road toll and brought it down. As we’ve recognised with cancer, we’ve brought the death toll down.
But suicide, we don’t like talking about and it just seems to me that as a member of the Government and as somebody that has this opportunity to write, that I had an obligation to talk about it.
It was something I’d been thinking about for a while and then I noticed that the day the article appeared was going to be World Suicide Prevention day so I bit the bullet and thought ‘let’s do it, let’s write about it’.
JOHN CLEARY:
Chris Bowen thanks for taking the time to do it and thanks for your contribution this evening.