Mr HARDGRAVE —Last Wednesday afternoon, the latest meeting of the Moreton Youth Advisory Group took place. This is a meeting where students from various high schools around my electorate get together with me every couple of months to discuss issues of importance to them. I find it a very important process to discuss issues with these senior students, who are often leaders of these schools. I met with students from Sunnybank, Mt Gravatt and Holland Park state high schools; the Clairvaux MacKillop College; and the Southside Education Centre for about an hour and we talked about the very important issue of youth suicide. They raised this issue with me against the background, they reported, of 12 students committing suicide in the last few months in Queensland.

It is a problem that people in their late teens are very well aware of. They recognise that there are problems in some students' homes, that there is not necessarily the right support. As parents, we were never given a manual on how to raise our children and parents can make mistakes. But these students, I thought, had the perspicacity to offer at least some observations about what is happening in their real world.

The students said that the variety of support they get from their school in the form of guidance counsellors is somewhat mixed. Some teachers are very good at their job and help to develop people and to develop students' skills. Some schools have guidance counsellors who do not give second chance strategies or who do not have the concept that if, as a teenager, you fail then that is not a huge problem in itself because making mistakes is part of growing up. But finding a way to get around that failure and get on with your life, to try and develop new possibilities for yourself is, of course, part of developing the skills we all need as we grow older.

Members of the Moreton Youth Advisory Group also said that the media manipulate people's ideology and glorify suicide. I suspect that is true, given some of the recent reports on the program Media Watch about how media organisations in this country have ignored the directions of the Minister for Health and Aged Care on the correct treatment of media reports on suicide. To actually show details of how people have committed suicide and regard that as news is an outrageous and irresponsible action and the media in this country have a lot to answer for in that regard.

It is interesting to note a comment from one of the girls from the Southside Education Centre, an organisation established essentially to give students who have been rejected by mainstream schools that second chance, that bit of extra care and attention to get them back onto the road of growing older and developing as people. The student said that the media really do have to respond to the pressures of change and have to be a lot more responsible with regard to matters such as suicide. I find the process of the Moreton Youth Advisory Group a very helpful one. It brings back into focus for me the issues that are important to our young people. (Time expired)