SUBJECTS: Launch of Lifeline's Stress Down, new portfolio, Prime Minister.
DAWN O'NEIL, CEO, LIFELINE:
Thank you all so much for being here today particularly thank you to Mr Bowen for being here and helping us to launch our Stress Down campaign for 2009.
Today what we're doing is counting the costs of stress on our community. The strain that it does put on our community and on the economy is quite significant.
We're revealing two of these costs today. One is from a report that's not yet been published but will soon be published from the Sydney University which shows that stress is costing us as taxpayers and our medical benefits scheme over a hundred million dollars a year. That means about $300,000 a day for us as taxpayers - that's the cost of stress.
On top of that, the research shows each of us on average take about 3 days a year as leave - stress leave - and sometimes it's called a mental health day. It's common knowledge that sometimes people - all of us - take a day out just to cope, to catch up, to deal with the stress we're coping with. The cost of that to our economy is about $5 billion dollars a year and if you add that to the cost of presenteeism that we know is where people are at work but not actually fully productive - that's another $10 billion a year - so overall the costs are about $15 billion a year and that's really significant which is why we as Lifeline are asking the country, we're asking every Australian on the 24th of July to stress down, particularly for that day.
Have a day off stress, have a day to think about our stress and about putting in practice some behaviours and management tools to help us cope day to day with our stress and hopefully that will become a practice for every day of our lives and save costs for our economy and society significantly.
At the same time we're hoping that people will put their slippers on for a day, have fun, relax and raise some funds and make a donation to Lifeline to help us cope with the demand of services that we do receive.
We talk to about 35,000 people every month through our telephone counselling service, 13 11 14, that's about one person every minute of every day of every year. So there's a significant demand and that demand is constantly increasing so we need funds to be able to continue to deliver those services in the most effective way.
The other thing that we're going to be doing as part of Stress Down this year is releasing a toolkit which provides a number of ticks and ideas of things you can use to stress down so on that note, I'd like to hand over to the Minister to talk to us about our Stress Down day.
BOWEN:
Thanks very much Dawn, I'm very pleased to be here to lend my support to Lifeline and Stress Down Day and officially launch it.
What Lifeline is doing is using a fun concept to make a very serious point. Fancy slippers and associated accessories are being supplied by Lifeline to make the point that stress, depression and all the associated tragedies are still very important issues in Australia - a very important social issue, a very important economic issue and most importantly a very important human issue.
Every society should care about all of our members, including the mental health and the emotional well being of the members of our society and there are many thousands of Australians dealing with stress every day. For some of them, that leads to a form of depression, and all the tragic consequences that go with that. Lifeline knows this better than any other organisation, being an organisation that takes 35,000 calls a month and I think Dawn would agree that probably scratches the surface of the issue that we're dealing with here in Australia.
So I'm prepared to lend my support to anything that raises the profile of this very important issue.
I'm here today because I'm a long term supporter of Lifeline and I have a long term interest in the issues of emotional wellbeing but I could just as easily be here in my official capacity as Minister for Human Services and Minister for Financial Services .
As Minister for Human Services, I've got responsibility for Centrelink, the Child Support Agency and other organisations.
I see stress when I visit a Centrelink office; I see stress when I receive an email from a Child Support client. I see the stress of people getting through their everyday business and as Minister for Financial Services and an economic Minister I know that one of the biggest impacts on people's stress levels is the wellbeing of their own finances.
Unemployment leads to family stress and their financial circumstances lead to great stress. Some people like to joke about stockbrokers jumping off window ledges; I don't think it's funny. It's a real issue about the impact of financial stress on households and family stress.
So well done to Lifeline today. I'm here to support it. Apologies from Nicola Roxon who couldn't be here but I'm happy to lend my support to anything which raises the profile of Australians following the pursuit of happiness in the least stressful way possible - having a bit of fun along the way.
We've really done a good job in Australia of lifting the profile of emotional wellbeing and taking the stigma away from mental strength over the last few years. We still have a long way to go. We still lose more of our family members and friends through suicide than we do through the road toll. We still have many thousands of our family and friends dealing daily with the problem of depression and of course will all the stresses of life.
So it does pay to take time out every so often and reflect on that which is what Lifeline is doing today in all sorts of varieties of ways.
I saw at my daughter's preschool, they're having Stress Down day. All the kids are invited to wear their pyjamas which my daughter is very excited about. So this is something which spreads throughout the community through all its levels. So well done to Lifeline and I'm pleased to officially launch Stress Down Day 2009.
JOURNALIST:
Minister, can we expect to see you in your slippers next Friday?
BOWEN:
Well Dawn's given me a pair of slippers, I'm not sure where I'll be next Friday but I'll have them on at some point during the day.
JOURNALIST:
Minister you've taken on a new portfolio, I imagine it gets quite stressful at times - do you take three days a year and how do you deal with your stress levels?
BOWEN:
Well everyone has a degree of stress in their lives and politicians are not exempt from that, in all seriousness. It is an issue, we work in the public gaze and we work hard as do all Australians. It's important for all of us to take a bit of time out at various points during the year and reflect, spend some time with the family. I try and do that as I know my colleagues do. It's very easy to forget to do it, with all the pressures that go with the job but it's important that we all do it.
JOURNALIST:
[Inaudible]
BOWEN:
Well I think everyone recognises that Kevin works extremely hard but it's good to change location occasionally - work from Sydney and take some time to reflect on where things are at and to continue to work but at a slightly different pace and in a slightly different location.
JOURNALIST:
Dawn, can you just elaborate a bit on your $100 million cost of stress a year? What sort of things does that figure cover?
O'NEIL:
In the report that Sydney University has done, that $100 million dollars is the cost of visits and GPs for days off work and time off work and dealing with stress - so the costs of the medical benefits.
JOURNALIST:
Have they done a comparison with other countries? Where does Australia compare in how stressed out we are?
O'NEIL:
There's not a lot of official information but we do know from research that we've done, the US for example is much more stressed than we are so their costs, their mental costs are much higher than ours so we're doing better. I think that overall Australia has not been as impacted by the Financial Crisis and that's been a credit to the government and their management so far. [Inaudible]
But it doesn't mean we aren't very stressed people. The Newspoll we put out yesterday showed that nine out of ten Australians are saying that they're stressed and forty percent of those are saying they're highly stressed.
JOURNALIST:
What can people do I mean when talking about how much it costs the economy to take time out and time off work but I mean sometimes people need to take a few days off work to cope. So what are things that people can do next Friday?
O'NEIL:
I think some of the practical things that we should do, not just on next Friday although we do want people to really stop and take stock of how they're managing their stress next Friday but to put into practice habits for a lifetime.
Things like ensuring you get regular exercise, eat a healthy diet, get a good night's sleep, and have time for fun and things you enjoy in life. It's really important to have a balanced life and that's what helps us cope day to day and they're the sorts of things we're encourage people to make a practice.
JOURNALIST:
Do you see a relationship between a downturn in the economic environment and people's stress levels?
O'NEIL:
From the poll we conducted earlier this week, that wasn't terribly evident. We saw a slight reduction in overall stress levels but we do know that people's major concerns - the thing they were most stressed about was their jobs and finances. So they're the big factors...
JOURNALIST:
So you're telling me there was a reduction in stress levels with the...
O'NEIL:
Overall - like over the past 12 months, that's from the Newspoll survey that we...
JOURNALIST:
Have you got any theories on why that might be?
O'NEIL:
Look we can extrapolate all sorts of theories. Maybe some people are taking heed of a lot of the message that have been going out over the last year. A lot of organisations, the Government has been encouraging people to see their GPs if they're worried, get help early, get advice early, so quite possibly [Inaudible]