“Covid-19 has not been easy for many New Zealanders, with job losses, economic uncertainty and more stress on families leading to Kiwis needing more mental health assistance than usual,” Doocey said. “NZAC [NZ Association of Counsellors] accredited mental health counsellors working in DHB’s are seeing a growing number of referrals as a result of the impacts of Covid-19, but are being told by the Government there is no funding available to respond to this growing demand.”
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National’s Matt Doocey is pushing the Government to fund 100,000 counselling sessions in next week s Budget. Doocey said GPs could refer people on to this free counselling much as they did after Christchurch, and it could be funded out of Thursday’s Budget.
On April 7, he repeated that in the House under questioning from National s Matt Doocey. The information that appeared in previous reports by the Office of the Director of Mental Health and Addiction Services is available in other places, but most importantly is available in the Nationwide Service Framework that has been publicly available for 20 years.
But it turns out that wasn t exactly the case, with Little correcting the record on Tuesday afternoon. I advised the House that all information historically published through the Office of the Director of Mental Health and Addiction Services annual report is publicly available. I did that on the basis of advice from the Ministry of Health that this was the case.
One official complained in an email obtained under the Official Information Act
that there was “a lot of data and negative statistics” in an earlier version of the report. Little defended the decision to edit down the report in Parliament, telling National’s Matt Doocey that all the statistics removed were available elsewhere publicly.
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Ministry of Health officials repeatedly noted that they were not legally required to produce the report. But on Tuesday he corrected this to the House, saying further discussions with the ministry had revealed that there were in fact seven different data points released in earlier reports that were not publicly available.
What we know about child sex offending is that the vast majority of it goes undetected, unreported, unprosecuted in the community, says Jordan Anderson, whose PhD at Victoria University looks at the creation of the register and its impact. This register in New Zealand is solely a register for child sex offences, so we have not registered all sex offenders, we have deemed that sex offenders who have committed offences against children are the ones that need to be registered.
Today on
The Detail, Anderson explains the tragic case of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling in 1989 in Minnesota that led to the establishment of a register in the US and triggered legislation to set up registers in other countries, including New Zealand.