New Mental Health Australia polling: two thirds of Australians say there is a gap between the support people need and what is available

Mental Health Australia published new national polling on 8 September 2026 measuring how Australians view the state of mental health support and what governments are doing about it. The findings are blunt. Around 68 per cent think governments should invest more in mental health. About 43 per cent say governments are handling mental health poorly. Roughly 65 per cent say there is a gap between the support people need and the support that is actually available. Just under half believe they could afford mental health care if they needed it, and 41 per cent said they would accept higher taxes to fund better support, against 32 per cent who are content with the current system. Read as political data, this is a message to governments. Read from inside an organisation, the 65 per cent figure is the one worth sitting with, because the gap between support needed and support available does not only exist at the national level. It exists in workplaces, and since the psychosocial regulations came into force it is a gap employers have a duty to manage. The WHS duty is not a duty to provide clinical care. It is a duty to identify the psychosocial hazards in the work, assess the risk, put controls in place, and review them. Job demands, job control, support, role clarity, change, exposure to distressing work. If a worker's mental health is being eroded by the design of their job, an employee assistance program brochure is not the control, and the public evidently already understands the difference between being offered a service and having the conditions fixed. For a board or an officer, the polling is useful as context for a question you should be able to answer. In our organisation, is there a gap between the psychosocial support our work requires and what we actually have in place, and if there is, what is the plan to close it. The answer needs to be a dated record of hazards, controls, named owners and review dates, not a statement of good intent. That record is also what a regulator or a workers compensation claim will ask to see. The national argument about who should pay for mental health support will run for years. The workplace version of it has a clearer answer already. The PCBU owns the psychosocial risk created by its own work, and the evidence that it is being managed is the employer's to produce.