Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business, Competition Policy and Consumer Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I join with other colleagues in paying tribute to our Vietnam veterans and the broader Vietnam veterans community, and to thank all those involved in making Vietnam Veterans day on 18 August the ongoing and unbridled success that it is in bringing the Vietnam veterans community together for a day of commemoration, reflection and camaraderie.

I should declare a pecuniary interest as a former veterans' affairs minister and patron of the Vietnam Veterans Association—Frankston District. It has always been an honour and a privilege to be associated with our Vietnam veterans' community.

It was often said that people knew there was something strange about my judgment when I actually sought the position of veterans' affairs minister under Howard government. Some have suggested that the veterans' affairs minister's role is a bit of a career cul-de-sac. It is a very challenging role when the broader nation has such understandable and well-deserved affection for our veterans' community, and the veterans' community are not terribly shy in advocating for their interests. If you are caught between that strong public sentiment to do all that one should do as a grateful nation for those who have served for our country and a very vigorous advocacy movement in the veterans community, you know you are in for some interesting times. But they were very worthwhile times.

To Ray Weston, the president of the Vietnam Veterans Association—Frankston District, to Frank Matons and all the team down at the Southern Peninsula—(Quorum formed) I was just paying tribute to Vietnam veterans' organisations in the Dunkley and Mornington Peninsula area. I particularly want to mention Cheryl Myers, the secretary of the Frankston RSL, who works very closely with the Vietnam veterans' organisations and who always is a key part of a very successful occasion at the Frankston cenotaph, notwithstanding our concern about broken fingernails when she approaches me.

The occasion of Vietnam Veterans Day is a very important one. Some 60,000 Australians, including ground troops, Air Force and Navy personnel served in Vietnam for over a decade from 1962. As my colleague and successor as veterans' affairs minister, the member for Bruce, pointed out many others were involved in that exercise of supporting our national involvement in Vietnam: the SEATO nurses, the courageous media personnel, the Qantas crews and many other civilians involved and associated with that effort.

The loss of life was very substantial: 521 Australians paid that ultimate price. We today continue our work in supporting those who returned with injuries, with wounds and with scars from their experience. Many helped secure that region and to shape its trajectory in a positive way but have carried deep personal scars as a result of that service. I also want to pay maximum respect to the partners of our Vietnam veterans. They have endured much over the years and are incredibly important as a cohesive influence in the Vietnam veterans' community. I support all that they do and the love and care that they provide to the veterans.

There was a point about this year's Vietnam veterans' commemoration which was particularly significant for those of us involved in ensuring that there has been appropriate recognition afforded to the Long Tan veterans for their remarkable deeds so many years ago. The Vietnam veterans' community itself chose Long Tan Day as its commemorative day and that shows you the strength of feeling and respect that Vietnam veterans have for their colleagues who served at Long Tan. But there was a long unresolved issue that was very much to the fore in my time as minister.

Some years earlier my friend and colleague Mal Brough had guided through the Howard government an overdue recognition of having medallic recognition upgraded. It was belated but his recognition that decisions to downgrade recommendations in Canberra were in contradiction to what was recommended in theatre was a courageous thing to do and that happened at the time that we were involved with Vietnam. Those on the ground, the command structure and hierarchy in Vietnam, had the best feel for what acts of gallantry were being undertaken by our personnel and for recommending appropriate recognition. At that time though those recommendations landed in Australia and people a long way away from the frontline in a number of cases decided that those well-grounded, well-informed recommendations should not be implemented and downgraded some of those medallic recognition recommendations from the field.

Thankfully that wrong was righted and Mal Brough was crucial to that making the simple point that for whatever reason—and often it was concepts of quotas and the like–if people had earned the recognition and that was a grounded and informed recommendation from the field it was a bit tough to have people a long way from the battlefront override those recommendations without the benefit of the context and the command structure on the ground. I am pleased that Mal dealt with that.

That only partly resolved some of the issues. It left open the question of recognition for the extraordinary gallantry at the Battle of Long Tan. It was an issue quite close to me. Dave Sabben is a friend of mine, he was a platoon commander in the battle. He is recognised within his peer group for his remarkable gallantry but, in the informal structure of medallic recognition, he and a number of others that were involved in the battle were not given, in my view, appropriate recognition for the gallantry and the remarkable deeds that they displayed on that historic day. Just what to do about it was a question that landed in my lap as minister.

It is very hard to revisit recommendations for the recognition of gallantry when all the core material that may have been available at the time is no longer available. What, let's say, a force of nature in the shape of Harry Smith was able to do was to make sure as a commander of the battalion in that contact that he persisted. He knew what he had recommended. He knew what he saw and he understood the context vividly because he was there. His recommendations had not survived the in country hierarchy and therefore had not been implemented in the way that he had hoped. This differed somewhat from the category that Mal Brough dealt with because the recommendations in country were clear and where they were changed back here in Canberra was also clear but all the core material was available to action. The difference in the case of Long Tan was that Harry's recommendations were not supported by his command structure in country which meant that a lot of that input, a lot of that source documentation, had disappeared. It did not move any further and it was substituted with other recommendations from the command structure in country. That meant that the base material on which to revisit that subject was not readily available. That in large part accounted for why over many decades revisiting that wrong was not undertaken by successive governments.

I and many others felt that a wrong had occurred. The question was: what to do about it? It was a decision of the Howard government in my time as minister to create the panel of three generals who would objectively look at all of the available information and arrive at a conclusion about whether Harry Smith's recommendations needed to be revived and whether we could bring together adequate material to make that a sound and justified action and then evaluate that material.

I am pleased that for this Vietnam Veterans Day those wrongs of years ago were put right. Harry Smith, a remarkable soldier, an extraordinary man and someone I greatly admire, was in receipt of what he had earned so many years ago during the Battle of Long Tan. Harry was awarded the second highest medal available under our current structure to recognise his extraordinary gallantry—the Star of Gallantry. Harry Smith was then the commander of D Company 6RAR. He earned that. I am pleased that this Vietnam Veterans Day he was in possession of that.

The platoon commanders at the time, Dave Sabben and Geoff Kendall, had also been offered a medal of gallantry, which was equivalent to the Military Cross that Harry had recommended at the time under the imperial system. Those two remarkable soldiers were also in possession of the award and medallic recognition they very much deserved. It was a long journey for those three men to get the nation's recognition they had earned, but they finally got there. I was pleased that work that was kicked off in my time as minister saw that wrong being righted.

I know in the eyes of Harry there is still work to be done. I have never met a man so single-minded in his approach to these issues. At the time of the battle he held no higher obligation than to look after the men he commanded. He still feels that passion today. There is more that needs to be done in his eyes. There are some discussions still going on with the overriding concern of how we can fairly and equitably deal with these wrongs so many years after the event. I talk particularly around some anomalies concerning Roberts and Sharp. But that was a good outcome for this Vietnam Veterans Day.

I would briefly like to touch on another area. When the war started I was not alive, I had not been born yet, but I did grow up with a lot of people whose dads had fought and I feel a very deep affection for our Vietnam veterans. I hope we have learnt a lesson. When I was minister I apologised to the veteran community for the way they were treated on their return. I hope our country and our citizens never again take out their disagreement with the government of the day in terms of the nature and the timing of a deployment on those who did all that their country asked of them. If people have a truck or an argument with the nature of a military involvement, they should take it up with people in this place; they should not take it up with the people in uniform. When they come back we should be proud and give them as much recognition and support as we can because they did all that their country asked of them. My simple belief is that the country should do all that it can to support them as a result of that service. That was something we sought to address. I hope we as a nation and a parliament continue to address those issues.

For me that has played out in some interesting ways. For the six Australian soldiers we did not bring home, I could not look their families in the eye and say that we had done all we could to find them. I pay respect to some incredible people at Operation Aussies Home, including Jim Burke. I do not know whether you have met Jim. Some think I am his love child. I can put on the record that that is not the case. He is far more gruff than I would ever be. He is a remarkable former soldier and he is still soldiering for those he served with.

Jim was instrumental in making sure that the Commonwealth and the defence forces, the Army and the Air Force, got off their backsides and did what they needed to do to find the remains of the Australian MIAs. I was incredibly honoured and blown away to be there on that tarmac to receive the remains, to fly there with family members and to return home and see those service personnel under my watch brought home and laid to rest. We needed to do more to find those brave Australians and I am pleased that the nation got around to doing what it should have done a long time earlier.

My colleague the member for Bruce mentioned the work we had instigated on the Children of Vietnam Veterans Health Study. This is another area where we need to remain vigilant. There is quite a body of evidence that service impacts on the next generation of a soldier's family, and we do not understand enough about that but we need to. That is why having that study commenced on my watch was again something I thought extraordinarily worthwhile. We should continue with that work and encourage families to participate because we can and need to keep learning.

The other area was in the Vietnam Veterans Counselling Service, which we reshaped as the Veterans and Veterans Families Counselling Services, again for that simple fact that serving the nation as the nation asks can have an enormous impact not only on the service personnel but on their families. In imagining some of the scenes that our serving personnel see, in realising that in places in the Middle East there can be a car swerving towards you and you have to decide if it is a threat to your people or just a bloody awful driver, in realising that you can then be called forward to help with a humanitarian response such as in an area that I was associated with after the tsunami—being involved in the clean-up of the hospital up in Bandah Aceh and recovering the remains of infants in hospital wards—you see that this stuff messes with your head. We need to realise that, just as our hardware needs through-life support so it can continue to perform at an optimum level, our people need that as well. Just as important as preparing people for deployment is bringing them back into a civilian world where they can go from being a combatant to being someone's Casanova all over again. This is a difficult transition and we need to keep working in that space.

My last comment is to the government around changes that are happening. I hope the savings that have been talked about with best funding do not undermine the veterans community's capacity to support themselves. I fear that it will. Our system revolves around volunteer support for service personnel bringing forward the injury, the impairment or the harm and the hurt of their military service where that has detracted from their quality of life and their capacity to earn, and appropriately recognising that and compensating for it. We make sure that ex-service organisations are the allies of veterans and serving personnel as they go through that process. If we undermine the capacity of the veterans community to support claimants for compensation and benefits to obtain all that they are deserving of and require then we weaken the foundation of the support system that is there to support serving and ex-service personnel.

I say that in the particular context of Vietnam veterans, many of whom are now approaching retirement age and many of whom have carried emotional scars and impairments from their service but have soldiered on. They have soldiered on in their careers and through that have continued to earn a livelihood and supported their families. But as they near the end of their working lives they may in fact put their hands up for support that is justified as a result of the impact of their service. If a veteran retires prematurely, perhaps because of an injury or an impairment, that has a profound impact on their eligibility for TPI and other benefits. Why? It is because those benefits are available where the capacity to work is impeded solely as a consequence of the impairment or the injury that relates to their service. If there is a sense that there are other factors at play, such as retirement, redundancy or some change in their life trajectory, that can undermine their capacity to access the benefits to which they are entitled. Right now is a critical time for the Vietnam veterans community because they are in that retirement age. I would hate to think that the trimming of the support in the BEST program would undermine people's capacity to access that help.

Finally, I want to put in a plug for a book I launched when I was a minister, Vietnam: Our War—Our Peace. So often Vietnam veterans share with me what a defining part of their life journey and their character their service is and was. But they also want to make sure that people realise that Vietnam veterans are doing remarkable things in our community, in our economy and in our nation day in, day out. This book captures a little bit about their service but it also captures a story about what Vietnam veterans have achieved for our nation as they continue to serve. They continue to serve not only their peer group but also the broader Australian interest. So I say to our Vietnam veterans: thank you most sincerely for your service. We are a grateful nation that made some mistakes that we are seeking to fix, and those remedies might not always be what they might hope to be, but we have to persevere in that effort. Also, thank you for what you have done as citizens of Australia not only in the broader community but in the veterans space, teaching so many of us about what we need to do to support the serving community that we ask so much of—how to keep them healthy, how to keep them happy and how to make sure the quality of their life is positive and the opportunities in the future are still there. We have learned that from our Vietnam veterans. So they are still serving and they have my utmost respect.

See this speech in context