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

It is a great pleasure to speak on the Veterans' Affairs Legislation Amendment (Omnibus) Bill 2017 in the context of the bipartisanship that has been demonstrated on this issue. I think the most enjoyable experience that I've had in this parliament has been working on security matters on the intelligence and security committee and on issues to do with veterans with members of the coalition. In particular, I think the Minister for Veterans' Affairs has really had his heart in his portfolio. I still would continue to advocate for, though, and support the suggestions by Neil James and the Australia Defence Association that the minister has got too much on his plate, that there should be more people in the portfolio and that the minister should be able to concentrate on the personnel and veterans' issues, and obviously the cybersecurity issues that are also in his space really need greater focus and concentration by support from another person in the portfolio.

The minister's doing a very fine job, despite those limitations. In particular, I really welcome his support for the bipartisan work of the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee in relation to veteran suicide. That was one of the issues, apart from family experience with that subject, that led me to work with the member for Berowra in establishing a parliamentary friendship group on the prevention of suicide. I'd like to thank the Minister for Health, who is at the table, for his support, and the shadow minister. They have been avid participants and have kept extremely open minds about the types of issues that have been raised in that forum, which have direct relevance to suicide issues for veterans, as well.

We'll be together again in Beersheba in a few days time, celebrating the victory at Beersheba and commemorating the service and sacrifice of our men in the field in that battle 100 years ago on 31 October. It is particularly poignant for me, as there were members of my own family in the light horse. They, both of my grandfathers, were back again in the Second World War. They were looked after by the Jewish community in the area while they were fighting in the Middle East, particularly in Syria and Lebanon. They went on to suffer great traumas, one as a prisoner of the Japanese on the Burma-Thai railway and the other with severe injuries he suffered in New Guinea. I learn a lot from the family experiences that I've been exposed to as to some of the worst aspects of the traumas that veterans have had to go through.

Every generation of our family has served in the army, going back to the Crimean War, the Indian mutiny, the Afghan War, the first and second world wars, my own service and my father's service—even uncles and aunts. So it is something that I have a lot of understanding of, from the personal experience that's been passed on to me. Since I've entered parliament that has been greatly expanded by the fact that I represent nearly 3,000 veterans in Eden-Monaro, who have an average age of about 66 now. Some of the stories from them have been quite tragic. One of them involved a veteran who had been a prisoner of the Japanese. His wife endured tremendous hardship for 40 years after he returned home after the Second World War, with his terrible nightmares and his resorting to self-medication with alcohol. She endured great hardships. He'd wake up in the middle of the night, strangling her, thinking she was a Japanese soldier. It came to a point where she just couldn't take that any more. Her life was at risk. She was advised that she needed to move out of the household, which she did. Her husband passed away but she wasn't entitled to war widows support, which she desperately needed. We tried to get her some ex gratia payments to support her. Unfortunately, she went into hospital for a hip replacement operation and contracted septicaemia and died in hospital. We were never able to achieve that for her, but her case highlights another aspect we need to look at in these processes.

The veterans in my community have raised so many issues with me about the whole issue around process: the point-of-entry experience and trying to get around the complexity of making a claim, with the adversarial aspects of it. We need to have a benefit-of-the-doubt approach to these things. They have raised all these issues with me, but as I was sitting here a couple of minutes ago, waiting to speak in this debate, I received an email from a veteran which really sums it up. I'll just read that letter to me. It's from Tony Cullinan, who says:

Dear Mike,

I am a member of your constituency living in Bega.

I have a lot of service injuries and they are getting progressively worse. I am in varying degrees of pain a lot of the time.

I own a small business and get by, but it’s pretty tight.

I have a lot of depression and anxiety around my injuries.

I’ve been sitting here for the last hour waiting to be linked into a directions hearing with the VRB—

the Veterans' Review Board—

which was supposed to take place at 10. I called at ¼ passed 10 and a lady was surprised and said she would get back to me. I’ve heard nothing and I am sitting hear waiting.

There are no advocacy services in Bega and I have been hooked into Woden – but it’s a long way and they don’t really know what’s going on for me. I really feel overwhelmed by all of this.

Respectfully,

Tony Cullinan

That pretty much sums up the experience of the veterans who have approached me. I am obviously very pleased to see an attempt to address these issues, with this legislation in particular.

On the concern that we raised about the principal member process, I'm really delighted the government's picked that up. It really continued to embed in this process the adversarial issue and denied members the ability to have their day in court and be heard, genuinely and openly, so I'm delighted that section has been removed.

Also, I'm really delighted with the aspects that we've been dealing with recently and are promoting in terms of employer incentive scheme payments. That transition process is such a difficult one for all ex-members. You come from a completely different cultural environment—a completely different family-like environment within Defence—and you move into the general community and perhaps bring with you some mental baggage which you know nobody around you understands. And you speak a completely different language, in many cases. I've experienced a lot of this myself. We needed to address more aggressively the issue of that transition, so I'm pleased to see that's happening and that the government's implementing some measures.

In my own region, I'd like to highlight two things that I'm really pleased with. One is Remount, a Yass based organisation that works with veterans. They have broken important ground. They take Remount members and employees and they do great work in dealing with ex-military members who are suffering from stress related injuries through their service, such as PTSD, by getting them to work with horses and having that experience. We know that a lot of association with animals and pets has been a great way to help our veterans deal with their issues, so I really want to salute Remount. They are sponsored by Lockheed Martin. I'm very pleased that we're seeing some of the defence industry companies helping us and getting involved now with these issues, knowing that they really do owe their own input into these processes of dealing with our veterans. Well done, Remount at Yass and Lockheed Martin.

I was at the Snowy Hydro the other day and talked to Gabrielle Curtin. She raised with me a program that they have where they have transitioning services for men and women and get them into employment. It's great to see them taking that active role. It is another great example of what the Snowy Hydro has done for our country. There are so many ways. They're taking that responsibility.

It's part of the general culture in our region to support our service veterans. It has the highest voluntary participation rate in the country. You will see a lot of effort in the community to try to assist veterans and honour them. Just the other day, we had the opening of a lovely rock memorial in Bega to the Lucas family. It was an experience that has not been replicated anywhere in the world, as far as we know: there were 10 boys in the Lucas family and nine of them joined up and went to World War II. It was a tremendous sacrifice by that family. Some did not come home from their service. The unique history in our region is something that we celebrate and honour.

Another example is the Union Jack memorial that you pass on the way to Tumbarumba. It's not a memorial to the flag, the Union Jack. There used to be a town called Union Jack and, during the First World War, every male of military service age was killed in the First World War. Their names are listed on that memorial. The town was effectively destroyed by a war 12,000 kilometres away because the surviving family members had to move away. It's very special for our region and I appreciate the measures that are being taken to render more federal government support.

There are a couple of issues. I say this in the spirit of highlighting problems we still need to address and where I think we're going down the wrong track. There were previous proposals to eliminate the Department of Veterans' Affairs and move it into Human Services. It was raised in an ACCI paper that my predecessor published when he was head of ACCI. Some work was being done on that when the coalition came to government. We're seeing it actually playing out in relation to Veterans' Access Networks. The Veterans' Access Network here in the ACT was shut down. It served a lot of veterans from across the border. The services have been shifted into the nearby Centrelink office on Bowes Street.

We're of course well aware of the problems we've had with Centrelink: the attempts to automate services, the delays and problems. We just had a story appear—I think it was yesterday—about the delays that have left recipients unable to pay for rent or food and about complaints having jumped to more than 50,000 in the past financial year alone. It seems that this is an attempt to remove the 'human' from Human Services, and it's causing so much stress and anxiety.

My electorate offices have been absolutely inundated with these issues emerging from Centrelink. We've basically become an adjunct to that office. We've had people in great stages of stress and anxiety who in fact have been suicidal, and my office workers have been doing such a wonderful job relieving that stress and anxiety by basically getting in and doing what Centrelink should have been doing for them and working with points of contact.

It gives me great concern when we're attempting to shut down our vans, shut down the human contact that veterans, in particular in rural and regional areas, really need. You really need a human to go to and talk to and lean on. The isolation that's already there in rural and regional areas can greatly exacerbate the problems these veterans suffer from. To shut down these vans is really the wrong way to go, and I ask the minister to get that one on his agenda too. It's just not right to try and push this into Human Services and Centrelink. These veterans really resent that as well. They do feel that the special nature of their service and their issues warrants them being dealt with in a unique way, and it's an insult to their service and to them to push them into this. But, as I said, it comes back to that broader issue that we're experiencing at the moment with Centrelink in general.

I think that issue needs to be addressed for the general community as well. They're losing jobs in those Centrelink offices in our region too, and it's part of the grievance that's going on out there in rural and regional Australia—particularly rural and regional New South Wales—at the moment. I was handing out at the Gundagai booth at Gundagai High School a couple of weeks ago for the by-election there. There was a 43 per cent swing against the government in that booth. It's just been a perfect storm of issues that they're concerned about: removal of services from their communities, loss of jobs associated with that and forced mergers. They feel that they're under siege from governments at state and federal levels and they're turning to other parties, which is a trend that is not to be encouraged when you think of who some of those other parties might be. So it's incumbent on all of us, the government and the opposition, to listen to what's going on out there in rural and regional areas and to understand that it's pointless complaining about phenomena like shooters parties, One Nation or whatever without understanding there is a set of grievances that underpin that which have to be addressed.

Those grievances are at the moment greatly affecting my veterans, who we're representing in this debate today. On their behalf and for their interests I would urge the government to back away from what's going on with Centrelink: certain attempts to cut pensions and support in energy supplements and the like, which affect the veterans as well, and attempts to cut back on educational support for war orphans and war widows in some previous budgets. I'm glad to see we've moved away from that, but there's more work to be done, and the government will have our full support in broaching those issues.

I'm looking forward to maybe having further discussions on this with the minister when we're in Beersheba in the coming days. I urge Australians to look back at that service, at that history and at that battle, because it's not well known amongst a lot of Australians. I really take this opportunity to commemorate that service. (Time expired)

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