Prime Minister Announces More Mental Health Funding

TODAY the Prime Minister announced $1.1billion of funding for mental health, telehealth and domestic violence support through the pandemic.

Prime Minister Morrison said while Australia is still seeing a strong increase in the rates of Coronavirus cases, percentage has fallen.

“This time last week the rate of increase on cases was up around 25 to 30 percent a day, that rate now over the last few days has fallen to about 13 to 15 percent,” said Prime Minister Morrison.

“Now they are still strong rates of increase, there’s no doubts about that,” he said.  

“But as we take the measures that we have been taking and we put them in place and we have the cooperation of the Australian people, then that obviously in turn has an impact on how we are managing the spread of the virus, but also how that impacts on our health system, on the population, on people’s jobs and livelihoods,” said Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

The $1.1 billion funding package includes:

• $669 million for telehealth services
• $74 million for mental health support services
• $150 million for domestic violence initiatives – there has been a 75% increase of Google searches for domestic violence;
• $200 million for emergency relief support – such as food banks;

New Apps:

• The government has launched a What’sApp information service, a link to which can be found at: Australian Government.
• There is also a new Coronavirus Australia app which can be downloaded.