Same name. Same site. New building. New model.
Graylands has been a hospital since 1909. What's proposed now is a different institution, on the same address, that has never been tested against this location.
That's the actual question — not "should Graylands exist," because it always has, but whether anyone has ever assessed this institution — this scale, this model — in a neighbourhood of roughly 2,000 homes and, across five nearby schools, around 4,800 students within about a kilometre. The site was chosen in 2021 on transport and infrastructure grounds, before the law that defines how patients move through the facility even existed. No document shows that choice was ever revisited once it did.
That's not NIMBYism — objecting to a location regardless of the facts. The facts changed, twice, after the location was already locked in, and nobody has shown their work since.
Nor is this a campaign against more forensic mental health capacity. WA's own psychiatrists say the opposite is true. The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists — the professional body for the clinicians who would staff this facility — told a Justice and Mental Health Roundtable of over 40 justice and health leaders in July 2026 that WA's forensic mental health system is "gridlocked across all its entry points," with people needing hospital treatment "delayed or denied it," and that RANZCP's own standards prohibit involuntary mental health treatment in prisons — meaning hospital beds for this population aren't optional RANZCP WA, Justice and Mental Health Roundtable Communiqué, Jul 2026. This campaign agrees with every word of that. The question it's asking is different: RANZCP itself says the redeveloped Graylands campus "will not deliver the number of beds sufficient for future needs," calls for a statewide "integrated, tiered" forensic system rather than concentration at one site, and for "delivery milestones" to be "published." None of that has happened here. Supporting better-resourced forensic mental health care and asking whether this site, at this scale, is the right way to deliver it are not in tension — the people who'd staff the wards are making the same distinction.
The detail, from the start
Everything below is sourced, dated, and drawn from government documents, Hansard, and the community's own 45-page research paper.
Two different patient populations
Graylands has historically held two distinct groups. General psychiatric patients are people with serious mental illness admitted for treatment, most of them voluntarily, under the Mental Health Act 2014. Forensic mental health patients are a separate legal category: people charged with serious offences — including homicide, serious sexual offences, and armed robbery — whom a court has found unfit to stand trial or not criminally responsible due to mental illness Community review §1.1. They are held under the Criminal Law (Mental Impairment) Act 2023, not a health admission.
The Frankland Centre has operated at Graylands since 1993 as WA's maximum-security forensic unit. Total current forensic capacity across the Frankland Centre (30 beds) and the adjacent Dryandra Ward (15 beds) is 45 beds Community review §1.1. The proposed expansion converts Graylands from a general hospital with a contained forensic wing into a campus built primarily around the forensic population — with the general psychiatric function substantially closed or relocated.
Graylands is the only facility of this kind in WA sited in a residential suburb. The state's maximum-security prisons, Casuarina and Hakea, sit in an industrial and correctional precinct in Canning Vale, well separated from homes and schools Community review §1.1.
What the CLMI Act actually changed
The Criminal Law (Mental Impairment) Act 2023 received Royal Assent on 13 April 2023 and came into full force on 1 September 2024, repealing the Criminal Law (Mentally Impaired Accused) Act 1996 WA Legislation ↗. Two changes matter directly to this site.
Custody is no longer indefinite. Under the old Act, a custody order had no fixed end date. The new Act requires a "limiting term" — a cap tied to what an ordinary sentence would have been for the offence — and Community Supervision Orders became a standard disposition, explicitly designed to keep a person "in the community... with the least possible restriction on their freedom consistent with the protection of the community." When the Act commenced, the roughly 56 people then held under the old regime had to be brought back before a review process for a limiting term to be set "as soon as practicable" Australasian Lawyer ↗. That review was a legal requirement of the new Act, not a discretionary clinical decision — and because some of those backdated limiting terms had already expired by the time they were set, this has produced what health professionals describe as "unplanned discharges": people released immediately because their limiting term was already served Community review §3.3.
This isn't a criticism of the law's intent. Moving away from indefinite detention is widely regarded as appropriate reform, and people held under these orders are entitled to the least restrictive setting consistent with community safety. But two things follow from it that matter for this site. First, every custody order now carries a mandatory limiting term and a legislated timetable of Tribunal reviews — that part is not discretionary, and it's what produced the "unplanned discharges" described above. Second, actual leave of absence remains a case-by-case decision: the Mental Impairment Review Tribunal must weigh the risk to community safety before granting it, may impose conditions, and may cancel it — the Act's paramount consideration is expressly the protection of the community. What's changed is the structure the decision sits inside — mandatory review points, an expanded set of leave and reintegration mechanisms, and a population moving through the system on fixed terms rather than being held indefinitely — not a guarantee that any individual patient progresses to unsupervised community access. The log and offence-profile statistics on the Safety risks page describe the population this framework applies to. No published document shows how this changed framework — including its leave and reintegration mechanisms — has been assessed for a campus sited within about a kilometre of five schools, which is the specific question this campaign is asking to be answered before Stage 1 proceeds.
Update, 15 September 2026: asked directly in Parliament, the government said community access for this cohort remains "largely consistent with" the pre-2023 regime, and that the Department of Justice was involved in project governance WA Parliament, QoN 3087, 15 Sep 2026. Neither is in dispute — leave was already a case-by-case decision under the old Act, and remains one. The same answer also claims demand modelling accounted for the new law, but that's not a claim worth building an argument on either way: government can assert modelling exists without ever publishing it, and there's no way to check it from the outside. The question that actually matters, and that this answer still doesn't touch, is narrower and checkable: was this specific site — a campus within a kilometre of five schools — ever reassessed against the CLMI Act's community-access model, rather than folded into a statewide bed-demand figure? Nothing published shows that it was.
Stage 1: funded and in design
Stage 1, funded in the April 2023 State Budget at $218.9 million (including $15 million from the Commonwealth), delivers on the northern campus:
- 32 new sub-acute male forensic mental health beds
- An 8-bed child and adolescent forensic mental health unit — the first of its kind in WA
- An Integrated Patient Services and Rehabilitation Centre, plus partial perimeter and civil works
Added to the existing 45 beds, this brings the northern campus to approximately 85 forensic beds after Stage 1 Infrastructure WA, Mar 2023.
Sub-acute doesn't mean low-impact. The 32 new beds carry a lower security classification than the Frankland Centre. Patients at this level participate in structured community access programs — escorted or semi-supervised outings beyond the campus perimeter — as part of their treatment pathway. The boundaries and protocols for these programs have not been publicly disclosed Community review §1.2.
The full plan: 136 beds, $698.3 million
Government communications focus on Stage 1. Infrastructure WA's own assessment confirms the long-term plan is substantially larger:
| Element | Detail |
|---|---|
| Forensic beds, northern campus | 136 (≈3× current forensic capacity) |
| Secure mental health recovery beds | 40 additional |
| General psychiatric beds closing | 118 (51 acute + 67 HDU) |
| Estimated total capital cost | $698.3 million |
Source: Infrastructure WA Major Infrastructure Proposal Assessment, March 2023 Infrastructure WA, Mar 2023
Only Stage 1 ($218.9M) is funded. The remaining beds — Stage 2 — have not been separately funded.
The school on the boundary
John XXIII College sits on the immediate boundary of the site, approximately 270 metres from the northern construction zone, and holds roughly 1,500 students from Pre-Kindergarten to Year 12. The College's own published history notes it was built deliberately without a perimeter fence Community review §1.4. The school occupied this open site from 1986 — seven years before the Frankland Centre existed. Every escalation since has occurred after the school was already there.
Four further schools sit within about a kilometre of the campus: Mount Claremont Primary (≈550–750m, ≈300 students), Moerlina School, Quintilian School, and Shenton College (≈2,800 students) Shenton College, 2024 Annual Report. Across all five, approximately 4,800 students attend school within about a kilometre of the campus Community review §1.4. The surrounding neighbourhood adds roughly 2,000 homes in that same radius, based on ABS census figures for Mount Claremont.
This exact tension has played out at this exact site before. A 2013 Murdoch University history of the suburb, built on State Records Office files and contemporary newspaper reports, documents what happened the last time Graylands' forensic role expanded next to a school:
Two things follow from that history. First: organised local objection didn't stop Frankland being built in 1991. Second: the interface between forensic services, this school, and this neighbourhood has been a recognised public issue at this site for over three decades, and government's own response at the time was to run a real, dated, advertised consultation process — not to treat the objection as unreasonable Mikus, "Graylands: The Evolution of a Suburb" (Murdoch University, 2013), pp.39–40. Read the fuller history, with maps and photographs, and why this change is different →
How the decision was made
The Graylands Reconfiguration and Forensic Taskforce (GRAFT) ran from January 2021 to July 2023, chaired by Hon. Jim McGinty AM (former Minister for Health and Attorney-General), drawing on the Departments of Health, Justice, Treasury and Finance, Premier and Cabinet, and Communities, the Mental Health Commission, and one independent member Community review, Annex B. No resident, school, or local government representation has been confirmed in that membership at any stage — and the Taskforce itself was dissolved in July 2023, with its functions since scattered across four separate agencies with no single body accountable for the whole picture. That gap may run deeper than agency handovers: where a patient's ongoing care is shared between WA Health, a mental health service provider, and — for anyone with NDIS-funded supports — a disability service provider, no published document says who holds responsibility for managing an escalating risk, including a patient who leaves an authorised setting. It's the same missing owner, one layer further down.
Four events occurred within three months of each other in March–June 2023, and no public record explains how they were sequenced or coordinated:
No agency has been named as accountable for the project as a whole, or as a single point of contact for resident and school concerns once construction and operations begin Community review §2.2.
What's happened since GRAFT — and what a builder's mandate does and doesn't cover
GRAFT was not replaced by an equivalent body. Delivery is now led by the Office of Major Infrastructure Delivery (OMID), part of the Department of Transport and Major Infrastructure since a machinery-of-government reform on 1 July 2025 WA Government, 1 Jul 2025. A government tender for engineering advisory services on this project, published in May 2026, states that OMID's project team works "in consultation with" Health and NMHS to oversee construction — a delivery mandate, not a mandate to test whether the site, the surrounding community, or the schools on its boundary are right for what's being built Tender OMID2026071, May 2026.
The same document confirms the project kept moving through the government's own internal process after the Taskforce dissolved: an updated business case was approved, and in November 2025 Cabinet approved a Project Definition Plan (PDP) — a standard Treasury-framework step the tender describes as refining the project's "strategic justification and objectives" and delivering "value for money." That's a scope-and-cost exercise. Nothing published about it addresses site suitability, security, the CLMI Act's changed operating model, or the schools and homes on the boundary — and the community was not part of it.
The contractor was appointed shortly after: ADCO Constructions was awarded the Early Contractor Involvement contract on 23 March 2026, publicly announced on 9 April 2026, at $5,619,001 on the government's own contract-disclosure record Tenders WA, OMID2026017. The same tender confirms an Early Works Agreement now covers both the Claremont Therapeutic Riding Centre relocation and "critical infrastructure upgrades to the HV, communications, water and fire mains systems" on the Graylands site — the enabling works residents have begun to see at the John XXIII Avenue boundary. A separate contract, awarded 11 June 2026, engages Turner & Townsend to oversee costs through what it calls the project's "ECI and D&C Phases" — the first place this campaign has seen that later phase named — running to April 2031 Tenders WA, OMID2026074.
None of this is evidence of anything improper. It's evidence that the project has continued to be assessed, repeatedly, on delivery grounds — cost, schedule, scope, procurement — without ever being reassessed on the grounds this campaign is asking about. Every internal check this project has passed was a check for something other than whether it belongs at this site, under this law, next to these schools.
Full governance timeline
Full annex with every date and source: see the Community Research Paper, Annex B.