Western Australia needs modern, properly resourced forensic mental health services. People in the justice system with serious mental illness deserve humane, well-funded care. That is not what this petition is about.

Graylands has been part of this neighbourhood since 1909 — that's not in question. In 1993 a 30-bed secure unit was added, and the neighbourhood adapted. What's proposed now goes further: closing general psychiatric care completely and converting the whole site into a 176-bed forensic-only campus, under a 2023 law that didn't exist when the site was chosen. That's not the same Graylands. It's a new institution on the old address.

This petition is based on our fully documented case  — eight separate concerns, each sourced to a government document or the public record. Three of them are the clearest place to start, because each rests on a single, undeniable fact, and none were ever checked against each other.

The site was chosen in 2021 using criteria limited to accessibility, central location, and closeness to public transport. Twenty candidate sites were assessed this way. None were assessed on school proximity or security, for a facility that would become Western Australia's only large-scale maximum-security mental health campus.

The law changed after that. The Criminal Law (Mental Impairment) Act 2023 replaced indefinite detention with fixed limiting terms and new Community Supervision Orders, and substantially expanded the legal mechanisms for community leave and reintegration — a fundamentally different treatment model to the one in place when the site was picked. Nobody has published anything showing the site decision was ever re-tested against the model it would now have to support.

The evidence was found wanting. In March 2023, the State Government's own independent infrastructure reviewer looked at the $698 million business case and found it had "insufficient information on which to base an investment decision." Three weeks later, the Government funded it anyway. No document explaining what changed in those three weeks has ever been published.

A few months after that, the taskforce that had made the original recommendation — the one body positioned to weigh the site, the law, and the evidence together — dissolved. What replaced it is four separate government agencies, each doing its own job correctly, and none of them responsible for asking whether the whole plan, taken together, still makes sense.

The government has since approved an updated business case and, in November 2025, a Cabinet-approved Project Definition Plan for this project — but nothing published from that process shows the site, the school, and the law being weighed together.

Across the whole hospital, Graylands recorded 153 absconding events in the one year a full facility breakdown was ever published — seven times the next-highest hospital in the state. The documented record includes a maximum-security escape, a nurse attacked days after a release decision, and a 2018 homicide two days after a misdiagnosed patient absconded. No published document shows anyone has assessed what a legislated push toward more community access, now written into law, means for this specific site and its impact on the students and residents there.

That is not NIMBY. That is a $698 million, irreversible decision moving forward on momentum, built on three things that were never reconciled with each other — while five schools and thousands of homes within a kilometre wait for someone to check.

What We Are Asking For

• Show us what changed. Publish the response to Infrastructure WA's finding that the business case was inadequate — what was added, what was resolved, and who signed off on it.
• Show us who owns this now. Name the single agency or official accountable for confirming the whole plan — not just their piece of it — is still sound.
• Show us the risk assessment for this suburb. Publish the assessment of how a campus of this scale, operating under the new law, affects the five schools, the surrounding streets, and the residential community.
• Confirm Stage 1 stands on its own. Show that Stage 1 was assessed on its own merits under the current law — not simply carried forward from a 2021 recommendation made under a different one.
• Show us the safeguards. Publish the risk-management framework, supervision criteria, and notification arrangements that would govern any community leave from this site.
• Consult the people who live here. Hold properly advertised public information sessions in Mount Claremont. Notify every nearby household in writing. Do this before, not after, the design is finalised.
• We are asking the Cook Government to pause all site works, publish the evidence, and conduct genuine community consultation before construction proceeds.

A Note on What This Petition Is Not

This petition does not oppose mental health services, the provision of forensic care, or the principle that these patients should be supported to return to community life. The community of Mount Claremont has lived alongside Graylands for decades without objection.

What's changed is not the neighbourhood's tolerance. It's the facility. A 30-bed secure wing, added in 1993, has become a proposed 176-bed fully forensic campus operating on a community-leave model that didn't exist when the site was chosen. Objecting to that is not the same as objecting to Graylands' presence.

What we dispute is how this decision has been allowed to keep moving: a site picked on the wrong criteria, a law that changed what the site now has to do, and a funding call made against its own reviewer's advice — three things nobody has ever checked against each other, on the way to an outcome — a fully secure forensic campus with active community integration, bordering five schools — that nobody has been asked to check still makes sense.

Initiated by the Mount Claremont Community Network on behalf of residents, homeowners, parents, and community members of Mount Claremont and surrounding suburbs.

Every factual claim in this petition is drawn from publicly available government sources: the Infrastructure WA Major Infrastructure Proposal Assessment (March 2023); WA Government project pages at wa.gov.au and buildingfortomorrow.wa.gov.au; Hansard, WA Legislative Assembly; the Criminal Law (Mental Impairment) Act 2023; and the Mount Claremont Community Network's full sourced research paper at mtclaremontcommunity.github.io/graylandsforensic — read it before you decide, not just before you sign.