Dr Ben Mullings, counselling psychologist, has been a fierce advocate for mental health reform in Australia. In this podcast dialogue, Ben describes his journey of establishing the Alliance for Better Access campaign, the battles against Medicare cutbacks, and his pivotal role in establishing the Australian Mental Health Party—the first of its kind worldwide. This conversation is a deep dive into the complexities of shaping policy, the resilience required to challenge political indifference, and the undying spirit of community rallying for the rights to accessible mental health care.
Navigating the political landscape requires more than just knowledge; it demands personal grit and a will to reveal the human stories behind policy statistics. Ben takes us through his personal experiences of adversity that ignited his drive to forge a path for others to follow. We trace the steps from his own struggles with homelessness to his empowerment through education and into the heart of political advocacy. It's a story that unravels the often-unseen intersection of mental health with social policies and the persistent myth that well-being is a mere consequence of employment and education. Through Ben's lens, we uncover the intricate layers of policy reform and the necessity for systems that authentically support each individual's journey.
The trials and triumphs of creating a political party are numerous, yet Ben's account of launching the Australian Mental Health Party is a testament to the tireless pursuit of a fairer world. He candidly explores the hurdles—from protecting members' privacy to sculpting a platform that intertwines health, education, and economic policies with human welfare at their core. This episode is an invitation to reflect on the balance of personal sacrifice and the quest for inclusive policymaking. Ben's story is a poignant reminder of the power of solidarity and the essential role of community engagement in the relentless pursuit of humanistic change.
This Podcast is sponsored by Onlinevents
Dr Ben Mullings, counselling psychologist, has been a fierce advocate for mental health reform in Australia. In this podcast dialogue, Ben describes his journey of establishing the Alliance for Better Access campaign, the battles against Medicare cutbacks, and his pivotal role in establishing the Australian Mental Health Party—the first of its kind worldwide. This conversation is a deep dive into the complexities of shaping policy, the resilience required to challenge political indifference, and the undying spirit of community rallying for the rights to accessible mental health care.
Navigating the political landscape requires more than just knowledge; it demands personal grit and a will to reveal the human stories behind policy statistics. Ben takes us through his personal experiences of adversity that ignited his drive to forge a path for others to follow. We trace the steps from his own struggles with homelessness to his empowerment through education and into the heart of political advocacy. It's a story that unravels the often-unseen intersection of mental health with social policies and the persistent myth that well-being is a mere consequence of employment and education. Through Ben's lens, we uncover the intricate layers of policy reform and the necessity for systems that authentically support each individual's journey.
The trials and triumphs of creating a political party are numerous, yet Ben's account of launching the Australian Mental Health Party is a testament to the tireless pursuit of a fairer world. He candidly explores the hurdles—from protecting members' privacy to sculpting a platform that intertwines health, education, and economic policies with human welfare at their core. This episode is an invitation to reflect on the balance of personal sacrifice and the quest for inclusive policymaking. Ben's story is a poignant reminder of the power of solidarity and the essential role of community engagement in the relentless pursuit of humanistic change.
This Podcast is sponsored by Onlinevents
Ben Dr Ben Mullings, it's great to have you here. You're a counselling psychologist based in Perth, australia beautiful city, and as well as a clinician for individual couples and families. You're a lecturer and you're an author, and, from 2011, you coordinated in Australia the Alliance for Better Access campaign, which was called Reforms for the Medicare System Australia and Better Access to Mental Health Care. And one thing that we're really interested in is that between 2015 and 2020, you co-founded and ran the Australian Mental Health Party to provide a humanistic political platform for policies which optimise mental health and wellbeing, particularly around access again, to mental health services, and, as far as we know, that's the world's first mental health political party. So it'd be really interesting, ben, to talk to you about that, but maybe you can just give us a sense to begin with where you were coming from and how the Alliance developed and what were the kind of personal and political foundations for that and professional it's a long story, but I'll give you the ultra short version.
Ben Mullings:So what happened is we heard that there were going to be some cuts to the system, which would mean that members of the public who wanted to talk to a psychologist or another type of allied health practitioner in the system for psychological therapy that they were going to go from a system where here in Australia at the time, there were 18 appointments that you could access as a maximum within the year, and the proposal was to cut it down to 10 sessions with no exceptions, and this obviously raised a few concerns. The rationale seemed to be that too many people were using the system and so therefore it was popular and was costing money. But all of the arguments around return on investment and what the positive contribution of that investment might be for society seemed to be being missed. And I guess, from my own perspective, I was interested in what happened to the evidence, the things that we know about how many sessions of therapy a person might need to recover and how that differs according to all kinds of different things, and what happens to those people when they commence therapy and they don't get to complete because the system just sort of cuts them off. So initially it began with myself and it would have been around five counselling psychologists around Australia, just on a little listserv, talking to each other asynchronously and sharing our own views and ideas.
Ben Mullings:And we realised fairly quickly that we were all sort of converging around the same ideas. We were sort of preaching to the converted and had very strong views about how the system should support more people and for longer, and so we wondered what did the public think? And so we created this Facebook page and initially, you know, we just sort of we threw it out to counselling psychologists, we threw it out to then clients who might see psychologists in general. And then we started to hear from social workers mental health social workers in the system, ots, occupational therapists who work in the system as well and we realised that there was a need to really bring together all the different voices and sort of find a common ground. And, as you probably know from these sorts of conversations, you know sometimes you get territorial issues coming up and issues around who's on top and you know who's in charge and these sorts of things, and we kind of wanted to level the playing field in many ways and just say, hey, what is actually in the best interest of people who use the system. So we came at it from that perspective and thinking about you know what do we actually need the system to look like? To make sure that when a member of the public is distressed and they're reaching out for help, that the system has a reasonable chance of being able to offer that kind of help to them.
Ben Mullings:So we sort of began from that platform. It was very difficult in the beginning, but we amassed quite a lot of followers on that Facebook page and it still exists to this day, although there's really not much activity there. I occasionally post things as an update on where that currently stands. So during COVID just to give you context, during the lockdown period, australia reverted back to adding an additional. They added another 10 sessions to the system. So when 10 with no exceptions, now you can have another 10 additional, but it's just temporary and it sort of rolled on and rolled on and rolled on and people came out of lockdown and it still carried on for some years and then it just lapsed and we're all meant to sort of quietly forget about that.
Mick Cooper:So, ben, where's it at at the moment? Is it actually now you can have more again, or it's not? No, it's back to 10.
Ben Mullings:It's lapsed. So we're back to 10 sessions, no exceptions, and the dialogue is sort of you know the community, the professions, we all kind of know what the system needs to reform. The political will doesn't seem to be there at the moment. So we gave it a red hot go when we were running this Alliance for Better Access so that sort of took off. We tried all kinds of things like initially started off with little summaries on a website, sort of summarizing the evidence around, say depression, anxiety, ptsd, these sorts of things. So we're looking for the most common presentations or the most common diagnostic tags and really just trying to help the broader public and our political representatives to understand it in plain English. So bringing together things like you would be familiar with, the nice guidelines, the evidence in the US from similar systems and evidence here from Australia, and really just kind of simplifying that.
Mick Cooper:And you even managed to get a letter from Aaron Beck, founder of CBT.
Ben Mullings:Yeah, so that was a moonshot really. You know, we I had a number of people on that page say, listen, we've tried, you know, we've tried these petitions. So we got, we got some big petitions which I'm assuming we'll get to in a bit. We got these summaries. We did a lot of media so we managed to get on the news a few times and on the radio we did a lot of representation for Senate inquiries and things like that, representing mental health and trying to argue for what we felt was important there.
Ben Mullings:And then someone said look, why don't you contact Beck?
Ben Mullings:And you know I don't want to make too big of a deal of it, but at the time I remember thinking this is like someone asking me to write a letter to the Pope or something.
Ben Mullings:You know I'm very unlikely to get a reply and I don't have access to his email. So I found that within a few hours and was very surprised that I got a reply within it would have been just two or three hours from Beck and he was quite happy to put something together and send that to our Minister for Health, our federal Minister for Health at the time. And from memory it said something like you know, in his estimate, working with moderately depressed individuals, people often need 24 sessions and perhaps more for a good outcome. Some people recover very quickly, others take considerably longer, and that, you know, obviously reflected what I knew as a practitioner and what most of us know. But having that from Beck was kind of important because it was this evidence that the system here with Medicare I think it's similar to the IAPT system and similar in the UK. We're, you know, we're often dealing with brief interventions, very structured interventions, this sort of thing, and here was, I guess, someone who had really championed that for many years and contributed greatly to the research in that space.
Mick Cooper:And Ben, what was it? Tell us a bit more about yourself. I mean, you know you were really putting yourself out there as starting to campaign for better access. Where do you think that came from? Personally in you?
Ben Mullings:It's a damn good question. Look, I think a lot of it had to do with coming from disadvantage myself as a young person. So, you know, my family sort of fell apart when I was a teenager and found myself at 14, homeless, and early on that meant moving from friend's house to friend's house, staying as long as I really could to continue studying in high school and, you know, in some occasions sleeping rough out in the bush and in our midland anyone from Perth wouldn't know that it's not a great neighbourhood and living in emergency accommodation and that sort of thing. And what I found is, you know, firstly, I couldn't even prove who I was at 14 and to interface with the social support system at the time, well, you have to prove who you are. So I was invisible in many ways.
Ben Mullings:I went about a year and a half without receiving any sort of support and just living off goodwill from people out in the community and I have to say I was, you know, profoundly affected. You can probably hear my voice, you know. The thing that stands out in my mind was that the system really didn't have a category to put me in that would classify me as needing any sort of support and I had no place to be. So all of my belongings were in this black canvas bag that I bought at Midland Army Surplus for $15. It was very cheap and it was like if I lost that bag, I lost everything. It was like a snail's shell, you know. And that really led me to think about all of the other people who had it far tougher than me and who didn't actually have good people around them that could give them shelter and support them. And I thank my lucky stars that I was able to keep going and that people actually believed in me.
Ben Mullings:So, you know, to me this sort of spurred me on.
Ben Mullings:You know, it led me to think about how do we create policies, whether they're overt government policies, this sort of thing, or even just social practices, as a society where people don't just disappear.
Ben Mullings:And during this whole process of doing this better access campaign, you know, it really struck me that it was like the concept of a person in policy was like a cardboard cutout. You know that there was this space in which people needed to exist. And so, you know, you know you could say the 10 sessions parameter and if you didn't fit that, then you kind of invisible to the system, you know, so in many ways identified with that. And then, of course, as I talked to lots and lots of people and heard their stories, which were very different to my own, it really started to inspire me to keep going, you know, to hear more and to just gradually refine what it was that we were doing, so that it would, I guess, bring together some of the perspectives that we were hearing and, of course, the more sessions for those who need them became the tagline in the end for this particular area of policy.
Mick Cooper:So there was something about people not being seen back when I put in a box and made to fit a particular template rather than being more visible. And I guess what you're saying, Ben, is that your own experience of invisibility really spurned you on, spurred you on to want to fight for people to be recognized in their individuality scene.
Ben Mullings:Yeah, I mean that was a huge part of it. The other side of it, I suppose, is that I've been doing all this training in counselling psychology. I've been trying to make a positive difference in the world and I guess I had this idea in my head that, you know, surely the research and the clinical wisdom that practitioners bring could be something that politicians might listen to. And saying that out loud now I feel a bit naive, I feel a bit foolish, but you know I don't want to be too hopeless and despairing about it and that frustration with watching these policies and others like it continue to be rolled out with a, whether we're talking about rationing, access to care or social support.
Mick Cooper:Do you feel, ben? Do you feel that they listened at all or do you feel that it just went outside their kind of heads?
Ben Mullings:It's a good question. It's a good question. I think politicians are often, yes, they're driven by their values and so on, some of those political, some of them personal, you know. So I don't think anyone would really be an exception to that. But ultimately they need to get voted in right, they in a representative democracy at least they want votes. And mental health it's way down on the list often, you know. And then when you add that lens, that we've got to toe the party line or we've got to look at how policy sits in that agenda of left and right and what the narrative happens to be at the time within that party.
Ben Mullings:I think it differs across the years and differs, you know, with political expediency, with different parts of the world too, different states. Even you know there's I don't know that mental health is really recognises the issue. So the classic one that would come up in Australia would be, say, for left leaning politics, for the Labor Party. Here there's a bit of a narrative around. You know, if we give people a job, you know we give them fair education, and there's a little scaffolding. That's traditionally on this left side that the mental health issues will sort of come with that, the mental health, sorry. The mental well-being will naturally follow and flow on from that which it can, but it often doesn't and you know part of that goes with. You know the policy agenda at the time that they might be wanting to lobby for a particular change and that's at the top of that agenda rather than mental health reform.
Mick Cooper:So do you feel Ben was there? It sounds like there wasn't hostility. There wasn't that they disagreed with you, they kind of agreed, but it just wasn't a particularly high priority enough to make things happen over and above other things.
Ben Mullings:There was that, however, when we first, if we were to look at the Alliance for Better Access, we were essentially challenging the government of the time. They wanted to cut the program and we wanted them not to do that.
Mick Cooper:What happened? Did you get any response from them?
Ben Mullings:I know you did a big petition, yeah so we, you know, we had to look at how do you actually create enough social momentum and pressure for politicians to actually pay attention to this. Initially, we started with meetings and things, and we could get those meetings, but not much would happen from there. You mean meetings with politicians, yeah, yeah. So we would literally call up the politicians, we would get their phone numbers and emails and we would arrange a meeting and we would put on the table some of our perspectives. We would write letters and often they would go unanswered for sometimes six months, sometimes a year or more, often never. We'd never get an answer. But what we did is we discovered that you could table a petition that politicians would then need to lodge in the Senate, but it had to be conforming to special rules, so it had to have this huge preamble at the top, a very formal and so on to the lady speaker and so on, you know, right at the beginning. And so we created these petitions that were worded like that and we mobilised practitioners and members of the public around Australia to print out copies of these petition sheets and start collecting, and we also had online conforming petitions like that, and then we assembled them all together.
Ben Mullings:That was colossal, can I say, putting them all together and what we found is that we couldn't initially get a politician to lodge this despite having 20,000 signatures. It was slightly over, I think. And in the end I think one of the members of our campaign over in Queensland happened to come across a politician from her state I'm not going to name that person at a garden centre and sort of cornered her, you know, said hey, we've been trying to get in contact with you about this petition, would you do that? And I think the human contact and possibly the setting and the charm of that person, they were able to get that, that politician to lodge that petition. But unfortunately nothing much happened with that, which you know, sort of, if you fast forward six months from there, that's where we went for that moon shot to contact Beck and go from there.
Mick Cooper:Yeah, and then so tell us, ben, about the Australian mental health party. Did that very much come out of this coalition, or was there other kind of roots to it?
Ben Mullings:Yeah. So what happened is we, you know, we found that we would sort of come to the end of the rope for everything with the Alliance for Better Access, and there had been a change of government and not much was happening with the change of government. So while the opposition the right side of politics, if you like, the coalition, we call it here in Australia While the coalition was in opposition, they were strongly supporting our campaign and really rallying behind us. But no promises, they said when we get voted in, we'll do something about it. Then, of course, they got voted in and nothing happened, you know, and that sort of led to a lot of frustration and eventually a member of the public in our campaign said look, what do you think about the idea of a political party? And this is where this idea of a political party dedicated to mental health and wellbeing came about. And initially the idea was just simply to carry this as a first policy, this Medicare thing. But personally, but at that point I was thinking, well, if we're going to create a political party, why not go for a wider scope and look at a wider suite of policy areas? And so we got to thinking about what sort of foundational principles would be behind that. And that's where you know, before agreeing to help to put this party together, I said, look, I'd really like this to be founded on humanistic principles. I'd really like this to look at a much broader scope. And so we agreed on three areas as a starting platform, as a bit of a litmus test to see how the public might respond.
Ben Mullings:So we began with Medicare and we actually built upon the common ground that we'd found and that groundswell of supporters that we had. A lot of those people came with us to help us. You have to have 550 voters who are willing to put their name, address and telephone contact details as they appear on the Australian electoral roll so that they can be checked with the Australian Electoral Commission. So we had to assemble that and that was that, interestingly, one of the first big challenges that we came up against, in that if you're creating a political party for mental health and well-being, you're naturally going to have a lot of people in that party who support that.
Ben Mullings:That might have their own lived experience. They might care for people who are going through things as well and they don't necessarily you know not, they might not necessarily enjoy getting a phone call from the Australian Electoral Commission, asking who they are and going through their details, if you know what I mean. And it created this strange kind of paradox where we need we really needed to have much more than 550 people and we needed to check by calling and letting our members know that they might get a call from the Australian Electoral Commission so that they didn't get spooked by these calls from the government. And we got over the line. We, you know, we registered the political party and that that was the first big milestone in many ways. And then we got to creating all of the other policy areas and a bit more detail.
Mick Cooper:So, ben, tell us about the policy areas. You said there were three main areas.
Ben Mullings:Yeah, yeah, so we looked at. We first started with the idea of a more caring health system, so we expanded beyond this psychological care issue and I guess the unifying principle that we went with is to think about the perspective of people who are distressed and they're reaching out for help for physical and emotional or mental well-being issues, and thinking about their experiences in navigating the systems that we put in place, you know, whether that's hospital or going to a clinic or buying medications at the pharmacy, these sorts of things, and so this is how we then sort of bridged across and so I said okay, so when it comes to counselling and psychological care, we need to have more appointments for those who need them. We need to make the system much more simplified, uncomplicated, less distressing for people who need to navigate that. For hospitals, when people are transitioning out of hospital-based care, especially in that one to three month period post discharge, we really need to think about how we help people to settle and become grounded and, I guess, return back to usual functioning or to improve their functioning from where they were before they went into hospital. You know, bearing in mind the very high suicide rate in that one to three month period post discharge. You know we looked at all kinds of things like fairer private health care. So when you look at insurance coverage at least here in Australia if you have a mental diagnosis, say, you go and see a GP and you get prescribed medication for depression or something, what can happen is when you sign up for private health cover, the insurer gets you to sign off that they can check your medical records and then, if you've tagged as having access care in the past, you can end up with exclusions which might prevent you from being able to make claims or increase your premiums for travel insurance for all kinds of different areas. And we wanted to tackle some of the unfaniness around that and actually set up systems that encourage people to get help when they need it, because obviously if people are reluctant to get that tag on the system, then they're not going to reach out for help and then that has a knock on effect for all kinds of other issues. So that was the scope for the health system looking at those sorts of things.
Ben Mullings:We were looking at the education portfolio. We wanted to see what would a person-centred education system look like if you were, say, for instance, looking at relationship education, which was a hot topic at the time. There are all kinds of programs being trialled around Australia about that. We wanted to try and find some of the common ground and we wanted to see if we could make this something that didn't just live within the health curriculum for primary and secondary school, where it gets wedged in as one module, or, conversely, having this type of education policy where we're essentially asking teachers to do more on top of what they were already expected to do, which is mentally unhealthy. You don't really want to be stressing out our teachers in that way, and so we're looking at how do we achieve that. We're looking at equitable funding so that the schools that really need more resources are able to get them. So there was a bit of a disparity at the time that we were seeing in the stats for Australia, and so that was really where we were coming from for education.
Ben Mullings:And then we looked at economy and started to think about if we were looking at economic policies and tried to look at it from a perspective of what would a humanistic approach to this look like. We floated all kinds of ideas around universal basic income and some of that, but what we settled on in the end as a set of platforms were firstly, for the vast majority of people who were trying to navigate, say, their tax returns, this sort of thing we need a system that's far less complicated and much more efficient. We're not talking about huge amounts of money here. We're just talking about the basics and trying to reduce stress and allow people to focus on contributing and participating in family life and these sorts of things. We wanted to look at social supports to help lift people out of disadvantage, and so things like raising the rate of new start, which is like a social welfare system that we have here for the unemployed. So that was way down the poverty line and below and I think still is here in Australia.
Ben Mullings:So, and then really targeting the idea of big business and how do we make policies that ensure that those that are earning the most are not getting out of tax completely?
Ben Mullings:This is what we were seeing. So we come up with this idea of having a minimum 20% effective tax rate, so that the lowest bracket of tax that one would pay back for personal income when we're dealing with the big businesses that maybe they could pay at least the lowest, that there would be a ceiling for how many tax deductions that would sit at the lowest level that others contribute. And when you're talking about big multinationals, we're looking at a 5% national turnover rate. So I'm thinking of huge companies that I don't want to name names because I don't want to get in trouble, but ones that they kind of profiteer in many ways off a nation and take all of the profits offshore. So we have this profit shifting thing and our philosophy was the relationship between a nation and these multinationals needs to be mutually beneficial. From a person centred point of view. If this is how we might engage with that, that was our idea at the time.
Mick Cooper:So, ben, how was it so you've described these kind of three main areas about economy and education, and the healthcare resound policy coming out of humanistic principles. How was it received by people? And we're talking about 2015, 16, is this?
Ben Mullings:Yeah, yeah, so it was around that era.
Mick Cooper:Yeah, so what do people make of it and how did you get on?
Ben Mullings:Well, I think a lot of people didn't take the party seriously. Part of that was to do with the name. We chose to go with the Australian Mental Health Party as the title for the party, in the absence of having a better unifying name for the party. We did float a couple of different ideas, but the you know and, by the way, the word Australian was put there basically because we wanted to kind of inspire the idea that perhaps people could do something similar in other places. You know that this was just our, our attempt at doing this and we would like to see.
Mick Cooper:What do you think it was? What was it about the name, About the? Was it the term mental health that made people not take it seriously?
Ben Mullings:We saw it as a niche thing and and to some extent they were right we were beginning from a very small space and expanding outwards. But as we imagined more, we could see more and more and more potential for this thing to expand and just didn't get that far. But the you know, I don't think that landed well and there's a couple of articles from around the time where people would critique the various parties and you know there are a lot of WTF moments, people reacting to the name of our party and what it was about, and I guess people didn't move beyond the initial few lines.
Mick Cooper:What were people saying then? I?
Ben Mullings:mean they would say you know what is this? What do they really represent? What else do they? Do? You know these sorts of things and to some extent, yes, I can see without coming from for that, but also I think there was a lack of imagination in many ways about what, what the potential for this might have been, and I guess the principle that we were trying to do in bringing together perspectives on the left, perspectives on the right, centrist positions, even people that were from a Greens stance coming together. You know that there was a very hard message to carry across and I think that would be one of the things that if if someone else did do something similar in another nation, that would be something to think about. How do you get that message across? How do you create visibility for the party? How do you get people to get behind this in some way?
Mick Cooper:Yeah, so you think that it was difficult to get that message across about the importance of mental health, that people weren't really receptive to that?
Ben Mullings:Yeah, I mean, unless people had lived experience with that or very close experience of someone nearby that they care about. You know, it was a difficult one to to kind of get across to people. Perhaps if we had more time we could have built upon that. But I think in hindsight we would have benefited from a slightly different platform, a different way of bringing people together.
Mick Cooper:What might that have looked like?
Ben Mullings:Well, I've thought a lot about this over the years, mick, since then, and I don't have any good answers, but one of them might be just simply to run with a platform around humanism itself, although then people you know who are not unfamiliar with humanism would wonder what the hell that means. You know, and the problem is, you preach to the converted, the people that are there supporting you, but does it go further?
Mick Cooper:Do you think there was any Ben? Do you think there was any stigma around mental health? People thought they supported the party would indicate that. Absolutely.
Ben Mullings:Yeah, absolutely. There was certainly some stigma around it and some of the negative reactions that people had about that. They did have that flavour to that. But you know, what I found is when there was an opportunity for dialogue, particularly in-person dialogue, I found that people were very receptive Once you could get through the first 30 seconds of conversation. So I know that when we were polling at the polling places, you know, it turned up in a suit and we'd have our little banners and things and spend the whole day on my feet talking to people as they go into vote.
Mick Cooper:Can you tell us, Ben, so you stood for Parliament in Perth, is that right?
Ben Mullings:Yeah, so initially there was the Perth by-election, so there was a vacancy that appeared and there were a short list of candidates and we decided to do a test run for that and we did very well at the polling places that we went to. So I went to my old stomping ground in Moorley and I think I mentioned that we got around 5%, you know. So somewhere around 1 in 20 people voting for myself, number one, and that was hugely encouraging. You know, we did a lot of meetings with businesses and others around the time and people were hugely receptive. It was exhausting having to talk and shake a whole lot of hands and go to meetings with all kinds of different groups, but it's certainly very rewarding as well to do that and I still feel honoured to this day that people gave us that time, you know.
Mick Cooper:So I guess that 5% shows that there is support potential for a party of that kind of nature. So you stood, and then you stood again, did you Ben?
Ben Mullings:So the ultimate aim was to run to do a Senate run for federal politics. And the reason we went for a Senate seat was simply because in order to really have a voice in the lower house, the House of Representatives, you're going to need a number of people to vote with you. It's a little bit more challenging to win those races for the elections For the Senate. It's a little bit easier, and then you can be part of that voice of reason when a bill passes and it goes to the upper house to kind of send it back for a few reforms and off it go.
Mick Cooper:So how did that go? That kind of run.
Ben Mullings:Far more disappointing. So we ran into all kinds of problems that I guess were we didn't have the experience as a political party, and so we were running into new ground. So things like you need thousands and thousands of dollars to create any kind of visibility, and that involves having a good logo. So we had to get graphic designers and decide what that was going to look like, and it had to conform to certain specs so that it would appear on the ballot, so that people could actually identify you in the sea of names. So there's like this long scroll of paper that you vote for for a Senate vote in Australia I don't know if it's similar in other places and so you can get lost in the sea of names. So having your logo there makes a big difference. So we had to do that, and so we come up with a circular emblem and so on.
Ben Mullings:You had to put up these banners, these core flute posters and things at polling places, and we found that there was a whole lot of skull duggery Once you. The practice is you put out these banners at the stroke of midnight. If you put them any earlier, then people can just come along and rip them off and throw them in bin. But if you do it a minute after midnight then there's federal laws that protect that. But then of course I found when I turned up at midnight that there were paid security that had been put in place by various political parties. And so you park your car and they shine a big mag light in your eyes so that you can't see anything.
Ben Mullings:And so I had to sort of sweet talk this person to let me out of the car and then get my cable ties and try to get it to shine the light in such a way that as well as it hitting my face, it also hit the thing that I was trying to attach the cable ties to and then move on to the next polling place. But then we found by the morning people had still taken these things down and by comparison to the bigger parties, they had hundreds of these things posted over every surface. We would have one or two that we could possibly share out of the few polling places that we could put them up after masses of fundraising. So that's the other thing you need. You need financial backers who are willing to put money on the table so that you are actually able to create visibility and people know who you are and what you stand for.
Mick Cooper:How well did you manage that? In terms of funding? Not well.
Ben Mullings:That's the short answer. We, we did everything that we could. We, we worked tirelessly. We, we ran all kinds of events, including quiz nights and Fun raises, and you know we had a singer to one of our events. You know it was. It was really a lot for a group of volunteers, very well attended, generated a couple thousand dollars, which helped us a little. I threw some of my own money behind it. I had friends that threw some money behind it, not a lot, mind you, but it was enough to create a couple of banners and things and, as I said, the results came through in the end.
Ben Mullings:Probably the most disheartening thing was that, when push came to shove at the election, the total number of people who voted one for our party Was less than the total number of people in our state who were paid Members of the party, and that didn't make a whole lot of sense to us.
Ben Mullings:It was, in fact it was incomprehensible. You know why would you pay to be a member of a political party and then not vote for that political party come election time? And I found that troubling. You know, and for me, I I've made a commitment that I would found the party, get it ready, bend down all the things like the core policy planks, to start with the Constitution, etc. But that I had to move on with my career. I had to move on with family life. I had two, two little kids at that stage show. Now my son is 17, my daughter is 12. You know, and you know, I'm very glad not to be doing politics right at this point in time so I can be there and enjoy my family and and try to put some work into my my career.
Mick Cooper:So what happened then? Did you do the party come to a close? You kind of withdrew.
Ben Mullings:Yeah. So what we did is we put the call out for, amongst the members of the party, for more committee members and people who'd be willing to run as political representatives for the party. And this was really the crux of things that we had enough members who are willing to stand with us and maintain our Registration. We had enough money to keep going. We could have kept building, but the problem was we were losing members of the committee who were taking an active role. And because a lot of things were happening online, especially when you think about leading up to COVID, you know, and how disengaged Everyone became.
Ben Mullings:And when you're factoring in things like slack to visit my spouse, where I know people don't really use that term much anymore, but certainly you know online polls and Likes and shares and this sort of thing. I don't necessarily translate into action. So that was a big learning lesson too. And and when we couldn't replace people, you know I I essentially said look, I, I did my part. And and if we don't have anyone to replace, say, the chair or the any of the roles that we'd set up in the Constitution that were required to keep the party running, you had this skeleton crew of people, so that there would have been about five people in the end who they had an enormous amount of work to do on their own and and we, we held a vote and said welcome, do we fold? And that was heartbreaking to.
Ben Mullings:You know, I think it took me about a month after the decision was made to to pull myself together enough to to put together a video and Say it to the people who stood behind us.
Ben Mullings:It's very, very difficult to do and my health had suffered in this time. I probably sound like I'm complaining now, but you know it took a huge Tile on me, you know, physically, just in terms of the sheer hours and and time that had been put into that while supporting my family, and I would have put on about 20 kilos in that time and and and in this last year and a half, you know, I've really just been working on my health and getting that back and my mental health and and social health, if you like, where there are a lot of friendships that sort of faded away after the party folded, you know, and and I guess you, my experience was it sort of came up against a lot of issues that I never knew were there before, like there's some of the activism that I've done in associations representing my profession counseling, psychology and so on. People have very different views about whether one should Take a political stance or whether we should be activated Sorry advocating for other types of practitioner to be eligible in the scale.
Mick Cooper:What do you mean, ben? Do you mean people within the profession were critical of you or critical?
Ben Mullings:in a huge way. Well, there were. There were people on All sides of the fence. There were people like that only wanted those with very advanced mental health Training to be recognized as practitioners. And there were those who only wanted who actually wanted a system that was far easier, that they let a whole lot more practitioners into the system to be recognized.
Ben Mullings:And and when we're trying to find the common ground to create these policies and get that grounds well of support behind us, we had to look at, you know, those structural elements of where we could find agreement. And Once you state your view on a position and then you you put yourself out there to say this is what the policy might look like, that immediately puts you at odds with people who have a very different view. Perhaps they might believe that only clinical psychologists should be practitioners, or they might believe that Counselors should be included into the system or peer workers should be included. My view is that there's a place for all of these different groups and and in fact we don't want to persuade people not to Participate and help one another in society and we've we've got to find a way to bring people together.
Mick Cooper:What I sense, ben, is that you put an enormous, enormous, enormous Amount of work and years into what you're doing. The alliance and then the political party, and I do have a sense of that you were holding, well, you and a few people, just a few people, holding enormous amount, and there maybe wasn't the support or the yeah, the support around you that maybe you would have hoped for, both from the profession and the wider public. It was kind of yeah, it sounds there was some antagonism, but it was more that people were kind of by the sidelines and that you were left to kind of carry it forward, and that really took its toll.
Ben Mullings:Yeah, and when I stood back it all just sort of fell into a heap as well. But I know this is a common experience. Having been on lots of committees and and done other things in my life For other causes, you know this. This frequently happens.
Mick Cooper:Do you think the Ben, do you think the strategy of trying to form a political party as opposed to trying to influence the parties that are already there, or as a pressure group, was a campaign group? When you reflect back, do you think that is a helpful way to go or do you think that was maybe a kind of diversion from from the most effective route?
Ben Mullings:Yes, the latter part of what you just said there. I think that perhaps you know, it was driven by this idea that if I didn't try, if, if, if someone's pitched this idea and that there's some merit and I can imagine logical policy possibility where this might work and no one's tested it before. As we said, it was a word, world first. Well, I would kick myself if I didn't try, right, I thought I'd. You know it's. What's that phrase? Who dares wins, right, fortune favours the bold. Well, it didn't. I did not win, you know.
Ben Mullings:But you know I gave it a good shot and, and in hindsight I would say, yes, I think you could work within political parties. The problem is, then you become this minority voice and I wonder if you would spend a whole lifetime, several lifetimes, still not getting anywhere. I wonder if it might actually be better to have this sort of second space, where perhaps you have a political body that serves to affect, influence, the narrative. But I wonder if, if that too would get taken over by various interests or would be seen as a lobbying faction and I think there are challenges with that too, that these sorts of groups do tend to be. We call it branch stacked that they you tend to get a group that comes into that that organization and becomes the backbone of it, and and that essentially that organization is then Serving the interests of another faction. It's it's no longer, it's lost, lost side of the cause.
Ben Mullings:But hypothetically, I think again, there's a logical possibility. You could create something that Attempts to bring together all these perspectives. That's essentially what aligns for. Better access started off as and I'm sure someone could do a much better job than what we do, so I really hope someone does. What would you do so?
Mick Cooper:what would your advice to them there? You said a little bit about maybe not focusing specifically on mental health, but more on humanism. How do you think somebody might be able to take it forward successfully?
Ben Mullings:I mean, possibly, if there's someone out there listening to this podcast and they, you know, they can see Merit in the idea of thinking about policies for people, that we're creating policies for people to navigate, and building on that principle in some ways and trying to bring together the different perspectives and somehow hold the lobbying in check.
Mick Cooper:I think that could work when you say policies for people, ben, do you mean policies for people with mental health challenges or more generally?
Ben Mullings:More generally, you know because I still believe that that I think the political positioning of policy reform often isn't about human beings.
Ben Mullings:It's often about GDP or jobs, or you know that there are certain benchmarks, outcomes that a political party might be interested in, that it's like they've lost sight of the fact that there are human beings that ultimately need to live with these policies, and whether we're talking about ones that help us to thrive and achieve wonderful things in society, or all the basic supports that help people that are really struggling, I think that you could create a lens that brings together both sides of that.
Ben Mullings:That's not just about sunshine and rainbows and it's not just about despair and suffering. That sort of brings it all together, and this is why I think this is what motivated me initially around humanism. You know and I think that we achieved that initially where you know, when we looked at who came to the committee and we did one of those vote compass polls on ourselves to see who are we you know who are the different people in this group we had dots all over the spectrum we found that there was a real difference in views and somehow we were able to reach some common grounds.
Mick Cooper:And that common ground was something around humanism, something around taking the perspective of people rather than systems.
Ben Mullings:Yeah, yeah, and certainly above things, like you know, financial prosperity or employment or the various other kinds of virtue, signaling that we see happening with traditional politics.
Mick Cooper:Ben, I mean, I think the kind of mental health and wellbeing community owes you a debt of gratitude for the work that you've done. You know what you're saying about favours, fortune, favours the brave, and maybe the fortune didn't quite favour you, but I think the fact that you put yourself out there which I've got enormous respect for and I think we all do, you know that you put yourself out there, that you work so incredibly hard and that you, you know you took a lot of criticism and challenge and you kept on going with it, really to see what would happen and to test out what it would mean. And you know, although in that instance it wasn't maybe the success that you or others would have wanted to be, and it's, you know, there's some really important lessons there that you've learned that can be passed on to the wider community about how, from a more psychological, humanistic angle, that we can make change. Ben, if people wanted to find out more about what you did and how things went and campaign materials, what should they do? Where should they go.
Ben Mullings:They could visit my website, drbencomau. They could send me an email. I'm a real person and I like talking to other people, so contact the word, contact at drbencomau. Talk to me. It's like talking to someone about their PhD, right? You'll never shut me off and I'm happy to help. I'm happy to help you if people want to. You know, connect and I've chatted with people in Ontario and Canada about some of their policies over there, with similar issues around the number of sessions and things. You know I am very happy to help people because we've got so many resources there. A lot of it is tucked away. So if you look on the website and you can't find things, ask me. I can probably dig up what you need.
Mick Cooper:And Ben, do you have a sense of what's next for you? That's very kind of you to offer that. Help you personally. More politics, less politics, family work.
Ben Mullings:Family is big. I want to enjoy my kids while they're still reasonably little and staying at home. We've got a few more years with my son, I suppose you know I just recently I've taken I've returned back to some of my interests before all of this, trying to find something good. You know, I met my wife on stage doing community theatre. We did a surf-themed musical comedy together and so I've auditioned for a musical and won a big role, a Broadway called Hands on a Hardbody. So anyone here in Perth who wants to see me make a goof of myself singing like a Texan, please enjoy the silliness I'm investing in that. I have my academic career and trying to make that work and my private practice. I'm focusing more on me at the moment, I suppose. But I can see that perhaps, you know, when some of that energy settles a little and I can't get up on the stage and sing and dance and do all that kind of stuff, then maybe I'll return to some of these things. Maybe you can convince me to do something else. I don't know.
Mick Cooper:Ben, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. And again thanks for all the work that you've done for the community and beyond.
Ben Mullings:Thanks, Mick, thanks a lot to hear you say those words.