A fairly small scale but it’s producing systemic changes, and opening access to young people from a $50 million investment over three years. Small beer in the Commonwealth outlays. Then, there are the eMental Health therapy programs. We have good evidence that online therapy is, for men, better than face-to-face therapy. Psychologists don’t want to hear this.

The evidence is building that a number of sessions – a guided, self-directed program over the Net, supported by a real person – can produce better outcomes (for mild to moderate cases of depression and anxiety disorders), than five or six sessions with psychologists. So the cost benefit is enormous.

For super funds and group insurers, there are partners out there who have these programs ready to go, evidence-based, Australian-made, world’s best, and they are desperate to find partners to make these things much more accessible.

Brad Morcombe: That would be a good avenue for a fund such as ours, Maritime Super. We’re a very blue-collar fund, being maritime workers. The stigma that members face is, well, it’s a blokey industry. We don’t talk about things like that. Having that online may remove some of that pressure.

Michael Rooney: There’s a bigger issue. We’re told we’ve all got to work until we’re 80 or 120, I forget which one it is. So, how do we ensure and encourage work participation, because it will help address the issue. The government keeps talking this rhetoric about people over 50 working longer, but the Government is not working with employment groups who encourage employers to employ them. So, older people are retrenched, and no one wants to employ them.

Pat McGorry: We lobbied for HeadSpace before the 2004 election. It received bipartisan support, and the idea was how do you get a stigma-free soft-entry zone into mental health care? Young people weren’t going to GPs or getting anywhere near our specialist mental health service. If they did, they didn’t like the look of what they saw.

In Melbourne, we’ve developed Orygen Youth Health which was bridging this adolescent young adult gap. We were seeing 800 young people a year – but turning away 1200. And there were another probably 20,000 that we couldn’t access. We needed a primary-care end, high-volume system which was HeadSpace: primary care, allied health, vocation workers, and drug and alcohol expertise.