Frequently asked questions

The State Government is converting Graylands Hospital from a general psychiatric teaching hospital into WA's only large-scale dedicated forensic mental health campus. Stage 1 — currently in design — adds 40 new forensic beds at a committed cost of $218.9M. The long-term plan, confirmed in the Infrastructure WA assessment, is 136 forensic beds at an estimated total cost of $698 million. The general psychiatric function will be substantially closed or relocated.

Graylands currently holds 45 forensic patients in the Frankland Centre and Dryandra Ward under the old indefinite-detention regime. Stage 1 adds 32 sub-acute beds — a lower security classification built around community access programs — plus WA's first 8-bed child and adolescent forensic unit. The Criminal Law (Mental Impairment) Act 2023, in force since September 2024, replaced indefinite detention with fixed limiting terms and new Community Supervision Orders, and materially expanded the legal mechanisms for supervised leave and reintegration. This is a change in what Graylands is, not simply more of what it already does.

Forensic mental health patients are people charged with serious criminal offences — including homicide, manslaughter, grievous bodily harm, and serious sexual offences — who a court has found unfit to stand trial or not criminally responsible due to mental illness. They're detained under court orders, not health admissions. The presence of mental illness doesn't remove the risk associated with the offending history — that's a clinical and legal fact government must plan around, not stigma. The community isn't asserting every patient is dangerous in every situation. It's asserting that the government hasn't disclosed the risk assessment or the community access boundaries for this campus under the new law. The full documented record — the offence profile, the absconding statistics, and specific cases where release and diagnostic judgements have gone wrong — is on the Safety risks page.

That's not quite what the record shows. Escapes, absconding, and cases where the public was warned not to approach a missing patient have been documented across three decades, including a homicide two days after a 2018 absconding and a nurse stabbed 24 times by a recently released patient in 2007 — see the Safety risks page for the full, sourced log. But the more precise answer is: that history is for a facility roughly a third the size of what's proposed, operating under a legal framework that's since been replaced with one that expands the legal mechanisms for community access, not restricts them. Whether the pattern holds at three times the scale, under a different law, is exactly the question nobody has published an answer to.

No. ADCO Constructions was engaged in April 2026 under an Early Contractor Involvement contract — a design-phase mechanism, not a construction contract. Main campus construction hasn't started. The Heritage Impact Statement hasn't been submitted. The City of Nedlands Development Application hasn't been lodged. ECI is specifically the phase where scope and cost are refined before any commitment to build.

Stage 1 already introduces categorical changes. The 32 new sub-acute beds carry a lower security classification built around structured community access as part of treatment — boundaries and protocols that haven't been publicly disclosed. The 8-bed child and adolescent unit is a genuinely new institution, 270 metres from John XXIII College. Stage 1 nearly doubles the forensic bed count, from 45 to about 85 — and under the CLMI Act's higher-throughput model, that involves substantially more patient-community interaction than the old law ever did. None of the eight documented concerns are resolved by waiting for Stage 2. They apply to Stage 1 directly.

No. The $218.9M is a 2023 budget allocation, not spent construction expenditure. As at August 2026, no physical construction has started on the main campus, and the government's own April 2026 statement puts the CTRC relocation target at 2027. A design contract and a not-yet-started relocation aren't grounds for proceeding to full construction without addressing the documented governance gaps.

The Taskforce (2021–2023) consulted clinical professionals, mental health consumers, and senior public servants about the best clinical service model. That's clinical consultation, not community consultation about impact on surrounding residents. No record of any public meeting with Mount Claremont residents, school communities, or local government exists in the public domain. An EPBC notification to the City of Nedlands that received no specific response is the only identified community engagement. OMID's own project fact sheet, reissued September 2026, gives the same answer today: asked directly what consultation has occurred, it names only the Taskforce's clinical and expert consultation — nothing about residents, schools, or local government. The same edition also answers, for the first time, what consultation it considers required: internal clinical and design input as a condition of hospital authorisation, with public or community engagement described only as something that may occur incidentally, not as something the project commits to OMID Fact Sheet, Sep 2026.

Yes, materially. Under the old law, about 56 patients were held indefinitely; release required the Attorney-General's personal approval; the population was stable and long-stay. Under the CLMI Act (in force since September 2024), all orders must have end dates, some retrospective limiting terms had already expired producing "unplanned discharges," courts can order patients to live in the community under supervision, and safe reintegration is now an explicit statutory purpose. A campus under this framework involves fundamentally more patient-community interaction than one under indefinite detention.

Yes — the MIPA process is advisory, not binding, and the community has never claimed otherwise. The argument is that a government that overrides its own statutory independent advisor takes on an elevated obligation to show what work addressed the concerns raised, and to release that documentation. It committed $218.9M about three weeks after the insufficiency finding. That documentation has not been released.

Not on what's public so far. A Project Definition Plan is a Treasury-framework process for refining a project's scope, cost, schedule and procurement approach — the government's own tender documents describe its purpose as refining "strategic justification and objectives" and delivering "value for money," not site suitability, security, or community impact. Cabinet's approval confirms the project is proceeding to construction. It doesn't, on anything published so far, show that the site, the 2023 law change, the schools, or the surrounding community were reassessed. If they were, releasing the relevant sections would resolve this in the government's favour. See what's happened since GRAFT for the full detail.

NIMBYism means objecting to something based primarily on location preference, regardless of evidence. That's not this campaign's position. Every concern here is grounded in the government's own sources: its own advisory body found the business case insufficient; the law governing every future patient changed in the same month as the funding commitment; the community was never consulted across five years and $698M of planning; and a publicly stated direction was reversed without explanation. These concerns would hold wherever this project was located. The location — a residential suburb 270 metres from a school — is relevant to the community's stake in getting answers, not to whether the questions are valid. There's a proportionality point worth adding: government has already judged that a change at this site — a single 30-bed unit added to a hospital that kept running everything else it already did — was significant enough to warrant a real, advertised consultation process. What's proposed now is larger by an order of magnitude and isn't an addition at all; it replaces the institution — see the full history →.

No. The community explicitly and consistently supports forensic mental health services and the need to provide them properly. The concerns are about transparency, evidence quality, and consultation — not about patients or their treatment. Making clinical and legal distinctions between forensic and general psychiatric patients isn't stigma; it's accurate. Avoiding those distinctions to sidestep difficult planning questions doesn't serve patients, the community, or the quality of the facility being designed.

Three things have changed. The function of the campus is shifting from a general hospital with a contained forensic wing to a dedicated forensic campus — a categorically different institution. The CLMI Act replaced indefinite detention with fixed terms and substantially expanded the legal framework for community reintegration, which didn't exist in this form under the old law. And the scale is nearly tripling. The community hasn't objected to Graylands' presence. It's objecting to a $698M transformation of what Graylands is, made without consultation, adequate evidence, or public explanation.

The community's position has been consistent: WA needs properly resourced forensic mental health services. The question is whether this site, this process, and this evidence base are adequate. An independent alternative sites analysis — which the community is asking for — would settle whether a better location exists. If there isn't, and the evidence base and consultation are done properly, the community will finally have the information it's currently being denied. Opposing inadequate process isn't the same as opposing the facility.

For some residents it's a factor — that's true of most people living near an unresolved question about their neighbourhood, and there's no point pretending otherwise. But none of the ten asks in this campaign depend on it, and no compensation or property-related claim appears anywhere in the petition or the research paper. The request — published evidence, an independent safety and consultation process, a real say before construction — would be identical if every home here were rented. The case doesn't rest on property values at all.

At minimum: formally advertised public information sessions in Mount Claremont covering the full 136-bed plan across every stage, not only Stage 1; direct written notification to every household within a defined radius and every nearby school community; and a genuine opportunity to ask questions and get answers before the design is finalised. That's the standard already applied to major infrastructure projects that materially change a residential area — not an extraordinary one.

Ten asks in total: pause site works until consultation is complete; release the full business case and evidence base; release the decision-making trail; show how planning was updated for the CLMI Act; confirm what the Education Department was told; release school consultation records; commission an independent alternative sites analysis; publish the community risk assessment; publish community access program boundaries; and hold genuine consultation before the design is finalised. Full detail is in Section 11 of the research paper.

Join the mailing list for updates. Write to the Member for Cottesloe and your federal Member for Curtin. Write to the Heritage Council of WA about the State Heritage-listed campus — this process remains open. Prepare a formal submission when the City of Nedlands Development Application is lodged. Ask your school P&C to write formally to the Ministers. Share this paper with others who should know about it.