Mental Health Sector Expo

Co-hosted in partnership with the Parliamentary Friends of Youth Mental Health and the Parliamentary Friends of Mental Health, we were delighted to welcome the Hon Mark Butler MP, Minister for Health and Aged Care, to speak with over 120 mental health professionals and attendees from 45 of our member organisations.

Mr Butler said, "The consumer voice, the carer voice, are incredibly important in making sure we get the design and the implementation of mental health programs – perhaps more than any other area of health – right."

"I want to thank all of you for the work that you do. These are really tough times. We’ve gone through an incredibly traumatic period with the pandemic that really impacted people’s mental health, impacted young people’s and children’s mental health, in some ways in a way that we hadn’t seen before, with the impact particularly of lockdowns, and that’s been followed by other crises... You have the best ideas of how we can do better to support people in mental distress, whether that’s relatively temporary mental distress or whether it’s lifelong relatively severe mental illness. I just want to thank you again for coming out this morning. I want to thank you for putting together this terrific expo."

In one of the last federal parliamentary sitting weeks of 2024, our members were able to showcase the incredibly important work of their organisations to parliamentarians, feature sector achievements, and promote the availability of mental health supports and services in local electorates.