Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Veterans' Affairs Legislation Amendment (Mental Health and Other Measures) Bill 2014. Stress is everywhere. I see that there is a bunch of schoolkids up behind the glass and I say g'day to them up there as we speak about this. I would like to ask them a question.

There will be kids up there who have left home for the very first time. Some of their parents may not be all that happy about their kids being away for this length of time and may be suffering stress. If you kids up there think about what it must be like for your parents to worry about you, then that is stress. This is what this bill is about.

But imagine what it was like in Afghanistan where the soldiers suffered green-on-blue attacks where, inside the perimeter of the camp where they should feel safe, insurgents got in and just shot people up. They killed a number of them and wounded a number of them. So when you woke up in the morning—and you think about this—and you wanted to go to the bathroom or go downstairs for breakfast, you had to first think about putting on your body armour. You had to first think that if you stepped outside your tent or outside your quarters, you might be shot. That is stress. That will affect your mental health.

They say that one in five adults during their lifetime will suffer their mental health being challenged. That is just one in five of us who just go through normal jobs with normal stress levels and all that sort of thing. When you put those levels into what it must be like in the Defence Force, especially the serving Defence Force where they are put in situations of extreme stress, think about what the levels of challenge must be.

As a society we must understand that we have just been through the longest military engagement our country has ever seen. Those of us who have been here for the last parliament and before will know what it is like to do condolence motions on soldiers who have not made it home, who have paid the ultimate sacrifice so that we may have the life we have here. The stress levels in their lives and the lives of their families are through the roof, and we must look after them.

I am proud to say that I am the member for Herbert; I am the member for the great City of Townsville. And in that great city, Townsville, we have Lavarack Barracks, the largest Army barracks and the largest Army installation in the country. We are also home to RAAF Base Garbutt. We also have Ross Island Barracks, where 10FSB is housed. We will be a major customer of the new LHD craft coming out, with the Army and the Navy working together. We are a proud defence city.

Part of that is that we must face these things in our society all the time. There have been issues recently where people who have been discharged from the ADF and who have served overseas have suffered breakdowns and the like, and when people go down they look for anything they can to help them in the short term. Too often, that is drugs and alcohol, which only exacerbate the problem. We are aware that there are issues out there, and we as a society are doing what we can. Townsville, as a community, are doing as much as we possibly can.

I will be saying a few 'thank yous' through this speech, and the first is to DHA, for the work that the Defence Housing Authority does in Townsville and the way that they have worked since the early nineties and the Somalia campaign. They have taken defence housing out of set suburbs and put it in amongst everybody in the town, and that has been a wonderful gift not only for defence families but also for those people who are not defence related.

I have never served, and it never even crossed my mind that I would look good in a uniform, but I do understand what it is like to be a defence family. As a child, you come through life with a collection of acquaintances, as opposed to great friends, and a great collection of school uniforms as your father, or mother or guardians go around the country to serve their nation and to improve their own career. So all the way through, the family unit is under stress.

Carol, the wife of the previous Brigadier, Shane Caughey, who is now a major general in Canberra, shifted something like 18 times, and Shane was there for one of those. When you are shifting your family around like that all the time, they are doing it on their own. And you have to worry about what is happening with your family; it is not just the veterans themselves. So the ability to make defence families part of our community has been a great benefit not only to the city but to defence communities.

The parliamentary secretary summed it up pretty well before. They used to call PTSD 'shell-shock'. As a society, we used to deal with it by sending them to the pub and if they could not fix it up there we would send them to the fringes of society. That is wrong.

Now, we look at them and try to make it better and better. Defence will always tell you that they are not perfect and that they miss things. But they do get better; every time there is an engagement it is also a training exercise for them when it comes to this and the things we do with veterans' health when they come back home. The Vietnam veterans will always tell you that they were brought in at midnight and told, 'Get out of here before the sun comes up. Make sure that you are out of here before anyone can see you.' The way that we dealt with them then as opposed to the way that we deal with them now is different. Now, we bring them back, we debrief them, we make sure that they are okay, we check them all the way through and try as much as we can.

Mental health is a major issue in Australia. It affects every corner of our society. It affects this place; my good friend the Minister for Trade and Investment, Andrew Robb, wrote a book about his challenges when it comes to mental health—when it comes to being able to deal with your family and being able to work through it. Black Dog Days is a very good read for those people who have actually had to front up to these sorts of things. There have been all sorts of people going through this and I will say now that I am on antidepressants, and have been for an awfully long time.

It got to the stage where my children were afraid of me, and my wife had to sit me down and tell me that the kids were afraid of me. That is very confronting. My wife called me 'Cleopatra' because I was the 'queen of denial', and when I went to the doctor I was still fully expecting that my doctor would sit down and say that it was Linda's—my wife—fault, that there was nothing wrong with me and that it was if only my wife would be nice to me. But you have to face up to these things about what has to happen.

I see the assistant defence minister walking into the chamber now and say that this is the way that defence will improve and this is the role that we can play. That green-on-blue attack that I spoke of in Afghanistan: one of the soldiers was wounded. He was in hospital by himself—alone in a ward. He said that he could not get better properly if he were not with his family. His wife was coming in, but she was still having to deal with the family and still having to deal with getting kids to school while her husband was in hospital. He had a badly injured leg—badly shot up. He said, 'If I can get out of hospital and go home and finish my recuperation there then No. 1, I will be back to work soon; No. 2, I will be able to help a little bit around the house; and No. 3, my kids will see me.'

But as soon as he left the hospital his benefits dried up. I spoke to the then shadow assistant minister for defence, and in an address in reply to a ministerial statement he raised the issue with the then Minister for Defence, Stephen Smith. Stephen Smith said, 'That sounds like something we can work on,' and between the two sides of parliament's we actually did something good on this. I think that is what was good about it.

When it comes to the people who serve in defence it comes down to the type of person. This is why we must treat mental health in defence differently. When you are lining up to be a soldier, an airmen or a sailor and you have that type A personality then you are bulletproof. You are a strong person, whether you are male or female and even if you are behind a desk: you still fit that personality type. It is very hard for them to admit that something is wrong.

You will find that these sorts of people will run around with sore knees and ankles. You will find that when you are an infantry man you carry a 50-kilo pack for most of your life. So we are talking about a very particular type of person. It comes to admitting that something may be wrong—and anyone can see when blood is pouring down their sleeves or out of their leg—when they have to sit down and think that something might be wrong inside their heads and you cannot actually see it. Through the sheer will of being a member of our Defence Force they are able to just chuck it out and get on with it. But they may have an issue, and it takes a great deal of passion, common sense and hurt actually to confront it. That is what this bill does. That is what we have to do.

I would like to read something said by Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith when he attended a Mates for Mates facility opening in Townsville. He is a VC winner and he said these words:

… the centre has opened at the right time. Now that our Defence men and women are home from Afghanistan, many need our support more than ever.

We don't want them suffering in silence with problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder which can be treated and overcome.

The budget places the mental health needs of our veterans at the centre of the government's commitment to the veteran community. Senator Ronaldson's four-pillar approach to veterans' affairs includes: recognising the unique nature of military service, maintaining a stand-alone Department of Veterans' Affairs, tackling the mental challenges facing veterans and their families, and providing adequate advocacy and welfare support for veterans and their families. Note that both the last two clauses included 'and their families'.

I want to give a special mention in this speech to the staff at the Department of Veterans' Affairs in Townsville, especially the ones we deal with, who are fantastic, and especially those in the VVFCS, the Veterans and Veterans Families Counselling Service, who are in my building. I do not know how we can ever repay the work that they do. This government recognises that more effort is needed. The government is proceeding with the implementation of a number of mental health initiatives from 1 July 2014, so this is right upon us. This year we will be spending more than $166 million on dedicated mental health services for veterans and their families. We have all sorts of people doing all sorts of things in recognition of this. There is Mates for Mates. There is Ian Bone from ANZAC Warriors who recently did a walk from Townsville to Proserpine.

You do not choose the time when your mental health will be challenged. No soldier, now airman, no sailor chooses to say, 'I will be affected now.' Some of these things will manifest for years and years and years. We must, as a society, understand that these things may happen and will happen. They will happen in our streets, in our families, in our schools. What we must do is recognise that this is part of life, post Afghanistan. We as a parliament must be prepared to support those who have put themselves in harm's way to help us. You do not have to be on the front line to suffer PTSD. As I said before, the Green on Blue attack in Afghanistan was the thing that really brought home to me just how stressful it must be if you are walking target. If you are overseas in an action, whether you are behind the lines or on the lines, if you are wearing a uniform you are target. We have to recognise that we have put a lot of people in harm's way—and there will be a bill for that. We have to be up-front with these people and assist them on their journey back to health.

I have said to anybody who deals with mental health that depression and anxiety are tunnels through which you go, not caves in which you live. That is the key here. If you can diagnose it early, if you can be up-front about it and open about the challenge then you can get through. I know in the case of the sergeant who got his leg shot—I do not want to use names—that his wife carried the can. His wife was fantastic in dealing with us and she never let up and she never forgot. When they finally got their benefits back, as we promised they would—and that came through under the last government, which should be recognised as well—she came and said thank you. That is the key here, that we are in this together.

This is a very serious bill and it is very close to home for me, for my city and for my community. I think it should be very close to home for this entire parliament. We make some tough decisions in here and we have to live with some of those things for a long time. They say Eisenhower stressed more over a three-foot putt than he did over sending troops in on D-Day. I doubt that very much. This is a great bill and it should be supported. I thank the House.

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