Queensland needs more mental health funding
As many as one in five Queenslanders experience mental illness including substance abuse disorders every year and one in two Queenslanders will experience mental illness in their lifetime.
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Given our growing population, Queensland needs more mental health funding, not less.
According to the Queensland Alliance for Mental Health, at least 10 organisations won't see their funding renewed from 1 July, worth a total of about $7 million.
I'm appalled that these important services have been cut by Annastacia Palaszczuk and Labor.
They literally save lives.
Organisations in Cairns, the Sunshine Coast, Central Queensland, Gold Coast and Brisbane are enduring funding cuts or being completely de-funded and many of them are afraid to speak out.
Community mental health services take pressure off our emergency departments, which are already at breaking point.
Health Minister Steven Miles needs to urgently reverse this decision and find the money in the $18.4 billion health budget.
Labor has wasted hundreds of millions on failed IT programs, but cuts hundreds of thousands to community mental health services across the state.
This is just another example of how Labor's health priorities are all wrong and Queensland patients are suffering as a result.
Ros Bates MP
LNP Shadow Minister for Health
MINBCSG going strong
The Mount Isa and North West Breast Cancer Support Group has been operating in the area for over 10 years.
We were happy to run the canteen at the McKinlay Races on June 22 as a fundraiser for the group.
The Races were a fantastic fun weekend with racing, food, music, great camping facilities and lovely people.
Thank you to all our sponsors for the weekend and I will name a few:
Meteor Rentals, Mount Isa Equipment Hire, BOC, all the lovely ladies who donated slices, biscuits and other goodies, and all the volunteers who worked in the kitchen.
If anyone has been diagnosed with breast cancer in the area, please contact the Mount Isa and North West Breast Cancer Support Group for help or through the Breast Care Nurse at the Mount Isa Hospital.
Gayle Steed,
Mount Isa
Decentralising the ABC
A Queensland country Senator wants the ABC to move its bases in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane to outer suburbs or the bush. This will magically remove all the left-wing bias which so many perceive in our national broadcaster. As usual, the whole thing is just another rural delusion.
Firstly, who will pay for it? Not the Federal Government, so it will have to be the ABC itself. The only way to fund it will be by closing down the ABC's costly, inefficient activities in the country. The uproar over this will make the fuss about closing just four WIN newsrooms look like a CWA morning tea.
Secondly, the good Senator forgets what happened when the NSW Nats moved the State Agriculture Department to Orange. Those in the Department, and their children who quickly grew up to voting age, all had city attitudes to everything. Orange instantly went to a Federal independent, and now has done so in the State Parliament too.
Just why Coalitionites want to flood country areas (or even conservative outer suburbs)with dangerous left-wingers from the inner cities is a mystery to me. The countryside in particular has been changing socially and politically for at least a generation now, but the Coalition as a whole and the Nats in particular seem not to have noticed. I also can't understand why they would want to speed up the process.
Grant Agnew, Coopers Plains
