BEDS IN MENTAL HOSPITALS IN DREADFULLY SHORT SUPPLY ACROSS QUEENSLAND

Only eight more mental health beds added in the whole of Queensland in an entire year since the Palaszczuk government slugged businesses with a "mental health levy"? 

C'mon Shannon Fentiman - please explain. It's preposterous. The figure should be at least in the dozens, or even up to a few hundred. At least add a zero onto eight and aim for eighty. 

There are literally thousands of Queenslanders right now who are suffering mental illness which warrants them being hospitalised for various periods of time. But tragically, just about all of them are being left to fend for themselves, and are not even being treated and counselled adequately, outside a hospital environment. 

The mental health facilities void in Queensland has resulted from decades of accumulative and short sighted austerity which can be traced back as far as the Goss government. 

It hasn't just been Labor which has gutted the life out of mental health facilities and care in Queensland. The Newman LNP government in its one term between 2012 and 2015 took an axe to it too. All in the name of cost cutting. 

No thought whatsoever for the ramifications of taking away the main lifeline for Queenslanders suffering the worser kinds of mental illness, who desperately need to be in a mental hospital to receive the care and treatment that they require, and what the community requires.

Fentiman has made some bold claims since becoming the health minister of fixing up the health system across the board. 

Once and for all, mental health care, and having enough beds in mental hospitals to cater for all those requiring "hospital care", must not be an oversight.