Purple Orange had the opportunity to provide input into this supplementary consultation regarding the Review of the South Australian Mental Health Act 2009. We recognise that this additional consultation has been prompted by several critical incidents that have occurred locally and interstate and acknowledge the impact of these events on all those affected. Nothing we write in this letter should be taken to in any way diminish the seriousness or impact of these events; rather we hope to make a constructive contribution to charting a pathway forward.
JFA Purple Orange has welcomed the South Australian Government’s intent to draft a new Mental Health and Wellbeing Bill for our state, and we provided our previous feedback in accordance with this. However, we are concerned about the nature of the content and process for this supplementary consultation; that the Discussion Paper seems to be, as is implied in the first paragraph of the introduction, an underdeveloped reaction to the politics of recent events. If so, then what is missing is the deeper work required to ensure the additional reforms will have the intended effects and work well with the previous proposals as part of a cohesive whole. This is not to say the matters raised are not important or that the previously proposed reforms were sufficient to deal with them; only that the Discussion Paper carries a set of ideas that may not be fully integrated with the ideas brought forward in earlier work.
As external observers of this process, it had appeared to us the work on drafting the new Bill had been based on an objective to elevate a human rights and wellbeing-based approach to mental health per the 2022 South Australian Law Reform Institute (SALRI) independent legislative review report. The revised approach revealed in this Discussion Paper seems to be to quickly retrofit a ‘prevention of harm’ model to the Bill while maintaining the previously drafted clauses including those with a different and possibly conflicting focus. We are concerned this approach may not be sufficient to produce an effective, fit-for-purpose, piece of legislation. We strongly believe such a shift in approach – one that the Discussion Paper acknowledges produces conflicts that need to be balanced in implementation – requires an additional allocation of time and resources to enable a comprehensive process to reexamine all parts of the Bill and test the conflicts to ensure they are mitigated. In our view, there would be benefits to commissioning SALRI to undertake an additional limited review to examine the elements of the new proposals that were absent from the Terms of Reference for its original 2022 review. This input can then inform a thorough process that engages all stakeholders to carefully and thoughtfully design a comprehensive, coherent, and purposeful response to the issues at hand. We strongly believe getting this legislation right is important enough to warrant investing additional time and resources rather than to risk unintended consequences resulting from a drafting process that has made a sharp change in direction mid-way through.