The WA Government has promised improved access to mental health services and better community engagement as it moves to tackle growing rates of Indigenous suicide.
Key points:
- The State Government announces $266 million in a "range of packages" related to Indigenous communities and suicide prevention
- The bulk of the money is to maintain essential services including housing maintenance in remote communities
- The response comes more than a year after a coroner made recommendations around suicide by Indigenous people as young as 10
The announcement in Broome on Friday formed part of the long-awaited response to a coronial inquest into the deaths of 13 children and young people in the Kimberley.
Aboriginal Affairs Minister Ben Wyatt said the $266 million package included $3 million for expanded mental health services in the region and $2.7 million to tackle foetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
"As a result of our conversations with young people in the Kimberley ... [it is] a thematic response around culture, health, community and youth," he said.
"The overwhelming message we've received is that this has to be done in concert with Aboriginal people.
"This is something that requires all areas of government to respond."
Sustaining remote communities
The majority of the funds announced were to continue basic services to remote communities including water and power.
"The Commonwealth has withdrawn its support for those communities, and this response around their sustainability is one we needed to deal with," Mr Wyatt said.
"Just over $200 million will go to ensure that those remote communities continue to have the sustainability that we want to see ... around the provision of essential services."
A new statewide Suicide Prevention Action Plan will receive $32.3 million, while the Kimberley Juvenile Justice Strategy will have an additional $6.2 million.
"[This is] a strategy that has had particular success," Mr Wyatt said.
"With conversations I've had with people from Kununurra to Derby, to Broome and Fitzroy, they wanted to see some of those programs not just continued, but also new programs introduced."
Mr Wyatt defended the Government's decision not to adopt the coroner's recommendations to implement Kimberley-wide alcohol restrictions or a voluntary cashless welfare card.
"I've made some comments on the cashless card; in some areas it may deliver outcomes, but my view is in remoter parts of WA, it's simply not working."
He said reducing the rate of youth suicide in the Kimberley was a complicated challenge that would take time.
"I assume you want a solution that you can go home today and feel good about — I can't give you that.
"People who expect a 12-month response are naive and silly; this is something that is going to take a long time to resolve."
'Stop promising, start working'
While the West Australian Government was preparing its response to the latest suicide inquiry, Daniel Rockman lost his son, granddaughter, and great granddaughter.
Mr Rockman's family made up three of at least another six suicides to have occurred in the region since the Coroner's findings were handed down.
Mr Rockman, from the remote desert community of Balgo on the WA-NT border, said he hoped to see a greater sense of urgency after seemingly endless inquiries, hearings, and research into the problem.
"All I want them to do is stop promising and start working together as a people of Australia, and to start listening to the young ones," Mr Rockman said.
"I believe those young ones need to be told that they are the future for the community."
It was in the second half of 2019 that Mr Rockman lost first his granddaughter, then a great granddaughter, and then his son to suicide.
"My granddaughter was like a bright morning star for my family," Mr Rockman said.
"There were so many things she wanted to do with her life, but her talents were shattered by her suicide."
The deaths had a heavy impact on Mr Rockman's family.
"Without her I'm just nothing. And my son, his life was just shattered," he said.
"At the same time I lost my son, and there was three sadnesses that I had — for my granddaughter, my great granddaughter, and my son."
But now Mr Rockman wants his family's terrible loss to help build a brighter future for young Aboriginal people across the Kimberley.
"What we went through we don't want others to go through the same thing," he said.
Mr Rockman said he believed hope lies in suicide prevention, co-designed with Indigenous communities, which was also one of the Coroner's main recommendations.
"I would say to the Government 'give the funding to Aboriginal people and let them work, and show they can do better'," he said.
"I want every mental health mob in the Kimberley to work together with towns and the communities because that's where the answers are."
Complex issues
The Government has been preparing a response since an inquest into 13 deaths of children and young people reached its conclusion last year.
Health Minister Roger Cook said, on the day the inquest findings were handed down, the Government would formally respond in the "coming weeks".
"These are very complex issues and they will not be solved overnight," Mr Cook said.
A few days later, Premier Mark McGowan hosed down the prospect of accepting the coroner's recommendation to impose Kimberley-wide restrictions on takeaway alcohol.
"The coroner made a range of recommendations, some of them I think are more practical than others," the Premier said at the time.
In May 2019, the Government released a preliminary response promising to work with Aboriginal people to address youth suicide and release a comprehensive response "by the end of the year".
Families on the front line
The Balgo elder's views were shared by Liz Cox, who lost her adopted son to suicide in 2015.
The community leader from the tiny community of Wuggubun, near Kununurra, said suicide prevention training needed to include families on the frontline.
"I think what could help is people being told on the ground, like parents and grandparents, about how to look out for suicide," she said.
"The services are there to provide professional help. But it is us as parents and grandparents … I think we have a big part as well in preventing these kids from doing what they are doing."
Mrs Cox said her son was a loving person with many friends, but he suffered trauma in his early childhood before she started looking after him at the age of 3.
"When he started school he was finding it difficult to sit in class, so he was always in trouble," she said.
"I had to go up just about every day of the week and get him from school and take him home."
He was diagnosed with ADHD, but Mrs Cox said he also showed symptoms of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
"Physically … he was filling out like a normal child of his age but mentally he wasn't that age," she said.
Mrs Cox said she believed her son had been "drinking a bit" at the time of his death at the age of 22 but did not show any signs of being suicidal.
She was supportive of the WA Coroner's recommendation for Kimberley-wide alcohol restrictions.
"If someone has got a mental illness and they are thinking of doing something, under the influence of alcohol or drugs, that gives them enough power to make them that game that they'll go and do it," she said.
Aboriginal-led to be successful
For Broome man Alphonse Balacky, the underlying issues of suicide need to be tackled.
The Coroner found that the deaths she investigated were shaped by "the crushing effects of intergenerational trauma" and that the children often experienced dysfunctional home environments which featured alcohol abuse and domestic violence.
Mr Balacky, a reformed domestic violence perpetrator, now facilitates a behaviour change program for Aboriginal men called Change Em Ways.
He also has personal experience of suicide, having lost a nephew and uncle in Broome within the past four months.
Lack of self-esteem, he said, was the biggest factor in the high rate of suicide in the Kimberley.
"I think it is our generational trauma, our learnt behaviour that we have contracted," Mr Balacky said.
"It has been moulded into us."
Impacts from the history of colonisation with the subsequent loss of culture, language, and country can be easily overlooked, Mr Balacky said.
"You don't see anything that's tagged on us that this has happened. But it's carried in our hearts and it's carried in our minds," he said.
"We've always felt second."
Mr Balacky said his experience with Change Em Ways, where participants often self-refer, underlined that suicide prevention programs needed to be Aboriginal-led to be successful.
"Having a mainstream program [they say] … 'I don't want to go to that place … it's run by Kartiya [non-Indigenous] mob'," Mr Balacky said.
"[They say] 'I don't want to sit at a table talking to a Kartiya about my problem, no way. I'd rather talk to you about my problems.
"'My feeling is easy when I talk to you. I feel like I'm not being judged. I'm not being hassled. I'm not being pushed.'"