Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure and a privilege to speak in support of the Veterans’ Affairs Legislation Amendment (Budget Measures) Bill and the measures it contains. Obviously the issue of the nuclear test veterans has been a longstanding one and it is good that in recent years we have been coming to grips with some of these issues, including taking measures to fix the situation of our former prisoners of war of the Japanese as well. Obviously the member for Solomon and I had similar circumstances in our growing up, completely surrounded by the stories of veterans and our family's veterans' history. Every generation of my own family has served in the Army. I remember very vividly growing up with stories from both of my grandfathers, my uncles and my father, and then as a young man going to university I used to do a night shift cleaning toilets in a rehabilitation ward in a veterans hospital. I watched veterans suffering from the effects of their wars, and then when they passed away during the night I would have to clean them up and take them down to the morgue. I would see comrades watching their friends being taken away like that. The stories, their circumstances and what they were enduring were seared on my memory. Then, of course, I served with some wonderful people over the course of a couple of decades in many situations and saw the circumstances of our modern veterans.

My father also worked on the nuclear test sites as a young man, and I remember him giving me a book about the nuclear tests, which I read as a young kid in the late sixties—I am giving away my age! Sadly, he passed away about 17 years ago so he will not see the benefit of this, but it is good that those veterans and civilians with us who were involved will be able to fall back on this legislation. The other provisions are also welcome.

I would like to compliment the Minister for Veterans' Affairs, Mr Tehan. I really do feel that he is a man who has these issues close to his heart. I have always had a lot of time and respect for him, going back to when he was chair of the intelligence and security committee. He always had the nation's security interests at heart. I am a bit concerned about the workload that he has, though. There are not enough members assigned to the portfolio. This is the lowest number of people involved in the Defence portfolio that we have seen, and I know that the Australian Defence Association has called for that to be addressed. The minister certainly needs some help, as he has quite a load of work, to free him up to concentrate even more on these issues.

I spoke yesterday about the impact on veterans of the approach to pensions that we saw in earlier budgets through this time of the coalition government. Thankfully those matters have been largely resolved. But I have been concerned about the impact of the removal of the energy supplement on our veterans, war widows, war orphans and their families. I have been inundated with emails about the effect of the removal of that supplement, and I really do call on the government to have another think about it, because it is going to cause a lot of grief out there in the community.

But I also welcome the minister's focusing on mental health issues. This has been a really serious concern for the whole community, looking at these terrible suicide rates that we have seen amongst veterans. For many years this was not being tackled properly, and I was pleased to see, when we came into government, that we came to grips to it in appointing Professor David Dunt to conduct a review of mental health services and support in the ADF. The review was a catalyst for more than $92 million to be invested and committed across DVA and Defence to improve mental health services for serving personnel and veterans. And we increased funding for the applied suicide and intervention skills training program to assist in that as well. We did the independent study into suicide in the ex-service community and the review of mental health care in the ADF and transition through discharge and introduced key initiatives such as case coordinators in DVA, who are now in place, and supporting clients who have complex needs. There were many aspects to tackling this, and I note that we worked on a project developed with the Australian Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health to improve the training and competency of secondary mental health workers, which started in 2009. That was in addition to the $145 million that we spent altogether on veterans' mental health annually. A comprehensive Australian Defence Force mental health life cycle package was also produced in association with the ACPMH. That progressed the first three initiatives of the life cycle package, including the longitudinal study of psychological resilience, resilience-building programs, and models for the annual mental health screen.

These were all really important initiatives, and they needed to be built on. One problem in this space, of course, is that there is never enough that you can do. You never get to the full answer to these problems. But that does not relieve us of the responsibility of continuing to work towards finding those solutions. And I think we need to really look at creative solutions and better stress management regimes for serving personnel as well as making sure that we are tracking these situations when people separate from the service and that there is a better fusion of data between serving personnel and DVA.

One thing I am pleased about is now working with the member for Berowra in the Parliamentary Friendship Group on the prevention of suicide. This is one area that we will be focusing on, trying to provide a collecting point for great ideas and solutions to help resolve that issue as well.

Suicide among veterans is a serious, serious problem at the moment, and it needs a full-court press. The old saying says that it takes a village to raise a child. Well, it also takes a village to support and sustain veterans. All of us in the community can play a role in that, and I commend some of the organisations that have sprung up, who I was pleased to help, like Soldier On and Mates4Mates. I encourage the community and all those providers to reach out to those organisations and help support veterans in dealing with their transition from those situations into civilian life.

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