Coleman Jonathan: Coroners Bill — In Committee 
Coleman Jonathan: Coroners Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:633;Page:4672] 
Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (National—Northcote) 
: 
 Madam Chair thank you for the opportunity to speak to Part 3 of the Coroners Bill. I did not have the privilege of being on the Justice and Electoral Committee which examined the evidence but I have listened to the debate over the couple of months that it has been going on and I must say I think this is a very important issue for our country. 
National is sceptically supportive of the Government’s stance on Part 3 which deals with the reporting of suicide. I think this is an issue that needs to be looked at closely and especially with regard to clause 61 “Restrictions on making public of details of self-inflicted deaths”. A point to make is that in no other jurisdiction in the Western World are the rules around the reporting of suicide as stringent as they are here in New Zealand. For that reason this is something we will have to keep under review. 
Personally from what I have heard and seen I do not think it is clear-cut that it is in the public interest to restrict the reporting of suicides but I accept that this bill will give coroners the discretion to do so. That is a very good thing because there is no question that we have a suicide epidemic in this country. If members look at some of the things that have happened in the last year in New Zealand they will see that in the town of Gore there was a spate of seven youth suicides over a period of a few months. There was a lot of speculation as to why that occurred but no one really seemed to know. There was some speculation about the media. I would not like to say the media had a role exactly but some of the media coverage around those deaths perhaps contributed to some of the subsequent deaths. 
Needless to say the point is that suicide is an extremely important issue in this country. I know from my own experience that one of the things that made the greatest impression on me as a medical student was turning up to the autopsy laboratory early one Monday morning. In those days—I am sure it is still the same at medical schools—students had to attend a certain number of autopsies. I can still clearly remember seeing two young men of my own age which was 22 at the time lying on the autopsy slab. They had taken their own lives in the same manner with a .22 rifle. I remember thinking that those two cases were completely unrelated in that the men were from different areas of Auckland and did not know each other. But it clearly pointed to the fact that suicide is a major problem in our society. That was nearly 20 years ago and the statistics really have not got a heck of a lot better since then. 
Yesterday the latest suicide trends for this country were released. I am not sure how the Hon Jim Anderton the Minister responsible for releasing the report has reached these conclusions but he has stated in his report that the number of self-inflicted deaths has increased from 465 4 years ago to 516 in 2003 which was 1 year later. That would seem to be an increase. However the 3-yearly average is decreasing over time so Mr Anderton feels that the long-term trend appears to be heading in the right direction. But I think the really interesting thing about the report and the statistics released yesterday is that the hospitalisation rate for parasuicide or attempted suicide is actually rising. It went from 66.6 hospitalisations per 100000 of population 20 years ago to 82.5 hospitalisations per 100000 of population for the period 2002-04. 
The interesting thing about that is that one cannot look at the suicide statistics alone; one actually has to break them down into their demographic. It is a well-known fact that men are more successful in committing suicide than women principally because men tend to choose more violent modes that tend to be unfortunately more successful. So there are more female survivors of suicide attempts than male survivors. Those figures tell us that despite the overall rate on a 3-year average declining because the parasuicide attempts and hospitalisations are increasing the problem of suicide is probably growing in our society.