The Association’s submission to the Select Committee on Mental Health and Suicide Prevention was uploaded to the Parliament of Australia website yesterday here (submission number 65).
Our submission calls for presumptive mental health legislation to be passed at a federal level. If these changes were implemented, police officers diagnosed with PTSD would no longer have to go through the arduous process of proving their diagnosis was caused by their employment.
At its core, the need for “presumptive legislation” stems from first responders specifically being at much greater risk than others of sustaining a mental health injury (by some reckoning, 10 times higher than the rest of Australians), and thus must be afforded a correspondingly greater level and access to appropriate protection and support.
Our submission to Parliament comes at a time when presumptive legislation has already been passed in Tasmania and the Northern Territory, with Queensland introducing similar laws earlier this week.
The AFPA calls on the Attorney-General Michaelia Cash to consider this important issue to help protect those who protect our nation.