Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

We have 12,000 veterans in Townsville. We probably have the best part of 20,000 or 30,000 family and retired veterans in the greater Townsville region—most certainly in North Queensland. It is almost endemic in our soldiers now that, if they go to war, they will come home and suffer PTSD. There are some people out there who say: 'They're weak. They're not strong in themselves. They are a soft race that have been sent to war; they're not like the Second World War soldiers.' I'm one of the few people in this place who actually has memories of the boys coming home from the Second World War. I was born in 1945. At the age of 10, these people were just nine or 10 years out of uniform. Almost all the town—prominent citizens—had gone to war in my little town of Cloncurry. The modern soldier comes home from the very traumatic experience that warfare is, and he doesn't fit in. In the Second World War, it was the other way around. If you hadn't been to war, you didn't fit in.

My father, who was booted out for being medically unfit, volunteered for overseas service. He volunteered before the war broke out because he could see it was going to break out. He carried a chip on his shoulder for the whole of his life that he didn't go to the war and that he was forced out of the Army. My grandfather on my mother's side, who was drafted into the Civil Defence Corps, carried a chip on his shoulder a mile high because he was not allowed to go to war. My great-grandfather and the great-grandfather of the honourable Leader of the House—our mutual great-grandfather—he wanted to go to war, and his father told him he couldn't. Only one of the boys could go, and they tossed the coin. I suppose the honourable Leader of the House and I were lucky that the coin went the way it went, because our great-grandfather's brother went to Gallipoli, and he's still at Gallipoli. He will always be at Gallipoli. In a terrible tragedy for our family. His namesake, Bert Henley, died some years after; his health was broken when he was released from Changi Prison and he died some years afterwards. So we lost two members of our family to two wars.

The point I'm making is that the people that didn't go didn't fit in. They came back to a society that was totally dominated by the people that had gone to war. In my family, on both sides, in all of the pictures of them they are all in uniform. Whether they were women or whether they were men, everyone was in uniform. So they were the norm. I have asked myself a million times: why were the people that came home from the Second World War far more able to deal with life than the people that didn't go to the war? Now the people that go to the war are far less able to deal with life than the people that didn't go to the war. Of course the reason is that they came back to a society that was completely dominated by the people that had gone to the war. Even this chamber 10 years after the war—I'd say at least half of the chamber were people that had been in the war. They got free education when they came back from the Second World War. There were soldier settler blocks made available to them. To a very large degree, the country did everything that was humanly possible to roll out the red carpet. Ben Chifley, the finest Prime Minister that the country has ever seen by a long way, built 26,000 homes, and most of those homes went to the people coming back from the war. They were the heroes and they were the mainstream of Australian society. These people are very much not the mainstream of society.

Unfortunately a lot of our culture showed pictures of people coming home from Vietnam damaged, and the pro-communist brigade—let me be very specific. Bill Hayden, the Labor Treasurer and Labor leader in this place, said that Evatt's conduct eviscerated the ALP to a point where we lived in political oblivion for 26 straight years. Evatt had six staff as Leader of the Opposition in this place, and two of them were leaking documents to the KGB. In one of the most extraordinary happenings that this place has ever seen, Mr Evatt got up here and claimed that he could prove that these two people had not been effectively spies for the communists. He could prove it. He waved this letter around, and the letter was from Molotov, who was the minister of foreign affairs and the minister for the KGB. That was proof that they weren't working for the KGB. The other side of parliament exploded in laughter, of course, and the ALP were white with shock and horror, because the downside of this was going to be oblivion for them for many, many years to come, as it was.

We move from a period where this nation was very under very great threat from communism. There were 500,000 members of the Communist Party. Sukarno had become a puppet of the communists and he was invading the surrounding countries. He invaded New Guinea; he invaded Borneo. I, as a young man, was handed an SLR—there was a 24-hour call-up—to go and fight the war against Indonesia, delightfully called Konfrontasi. You can call it what you want, but, as far as I was concerned, I had a rifle, I was being sent up there and someone was going to shoot me and try to kill me when I got up there. Their army was 20 times the size of our Army.

Communism was very real. The history books now read that communism died in Vietnam. The expansion of communism died in Vietnam. The last Governor-General said this on Vietnam day: 'The history books are now read and the communists never took another state.' Until that time, every two years after the war, they gobbled up a new country. One of the countries they gobbled up was China, the biggest country on earth. They most certainly had India on their side and they most certainly had the Arab states that came together on their side, so there wasn't much left on our side. A quarter of Europe was part of the USSR at that stage. So the world was threatened. Now we know that the heroes were the people who fought and died in Vietnam. At the time, it was a very questionable war, and it was seen that way by the population. Many of my generation didn't want to go to war. They were scared, and you can't blame them for being scared. It was not anywhere near as clear cut as it is now. History takes a long-term view.

The world, not Australia, owes Vietnam vets so much, because, of all the great upheavals in human history, by far and away the worst was communism. Stalin was responsible for the direct murder or indirect deaths of 28 million people and every history book now reads that Mao Tse-tung was responsible for the deaths of 48 million people. That does not include the upheavals in Africa caused by the communists and the upheavals in Asia caused by the communists. Many tens of millions would be added to that list if you put those people in. So it's the worst scourge the world has ever seen—worse than slavery, worse than 'the Sword of Allah', as he called himself, who murdered four per cent of the world's population; worse than any of those people.

When we are talking about vets affairs we are still mainly talking about the people who fought in Vietnam. Our treatment of them has been absolutely lamentable. There were my six best friends through primary school and through secondary school and my cousin, who was my best friend—a groomsman at my wedding. My cousin's best friend drank himself to death and his best friend was busily trying to drink himself to death. There are so many people that I know and am friends with who were treated so shabbily, and the great heroes who crushed communism are treated so shabbily.

Now, let me turn to the DVA. I urge the minister to consider that it has failed. You could not watch that 60 Minutes show or the Four Corners show on people who did away with themselves. I thought the previous speaker was dead accurate in everything that he said. I just wish Mike Kelly were here as well to say these things. Clearly, it was the interaction with the DVA that caused the horrific results that were shown on 60 Minutes and Four Corners. I deliberately watched both programs and recorded one of them so I could watch it again, because I represent so many of these people. I represent the Northern Beaches of Townsville and I represent where a lot of veterans retired—the coast up to Cairns and Cairns itself. Some of those people come under my responsibility.

Those of us at the coalface can clearly see a situation where anxiety comes in at a low level and then becomes a problem. They then go along and see the DVA, and then anxiety turns into trauma—and, from then on, we are in an absolute disaster zone. I don't know what transpires—and I'm not going to take up the time of the House going into what may transpire. All I can say is that the DVA is a department that has failed totally and miserably. There is only one way that this can be addressed, and I officially and publicly call upon the minister to abolish the department and replace it by a board, an authority, consisting of people who have actually fought in the wars and been in the Army—and a majority of them not senior ranking officers but NCOs and ORs.

Having served a lot of my life in the Army—and, whilst it was in the militia, it was on a war footing; so it was anything but a militia at the time—I believe that the only way this problem can be overcome is by putting the people that have been through it, and are going through it, in charge of the administration of veterans affairs in this country. It is not suitable for a government department to be running this, and clearly the government department has failed and failed miserably. In Townsville, they ran in the newspaper a front-page, massive article on homelessness. I conclude on this note: we can't even provide a home for the people that destroyed communism throughout the world. We can't even provide a roof over their head.

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