Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to support this motion and thank the member for Stirling for moving it. As a fellow veteran I acknowledge and thank him for his service, along with all other veterans in this place. The health and welfare of our defence personnel and veterans and their families is an extremely high priority for Labor. We understand, as I'm sure those opposite do, that we owe a duty of care not just for the time that people serve but continuing past peoples' service.

To that end, I think it was an extraordinary admission by the Minister for Veterans' Affairs—I think it was last year—that the government didn't know how many veterans died from suicide each year, and it didn't have reliable national figures for veterans in general. The reality is that we need to have the best information available if we're going to provide the best possible care and support for our ex-service personnel. So I, hopefully like everyone else in this place, support the addition of a question in the census.

Before the last election, Labor committed to improving the record keeping, data collection and information sharing between Defence, the Department of Veterans' Affairs and other agencies to address current gaps in the health of our personnel and veterans. We called for the government to include this question on military service in the next national census, to better inform the support of our veterans. The states and territories have long argued for this. In 2017 veterans affairs ministers from across Australia recognised the importance of the issue, unanimously agreeing that a question about veterans should be included in the next Australian census. This was then reinforced in 2018 and 2019, when those ministers again recognised the need for robust data on veterans issues, strongly endorsed the need for a veteran indicator in the 2021 census and discussed the benefits of this.

I want to acknowledge the WA Labor government minister and former SAS officer Peter Tinley, in particular, because I know he has been a very strong advocate of this. We welcome the fact that the 2021 census will include such a question about whether someone has served in the ADF. We know that having a census question around ADF service will help provide a more complete picture of the number of veterans in Australia and will allow governments at all levels to deliver the right services in the right areas to support veterans and their families. Recent reports on issues such as veteran suicide and homelessness, in particular, have highlighted that too many veterans are falling through the cracks and struggling to cope after leaving the ADF. We're facing an increasingly dire situation that will worsen as the longer term impacts of trauma and stress from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, in particular, manifest amongst veterans. We need to have the best information available to understand these issues and provide the best possible care and support.

But the government cannot afford to see a new census question and the resulting data as a cure-all that will solve all policy problems on its own or an excuse to do nothing in the meantime. For a start, the government needs to do a lot more to support our Defence personnel when it comes to transitioning out of the ADF into civilian life through better support for mental health and suicide prevention, employment and housing. This is why we desperately need a full royal commission into veteran suicide with a clear start and end date, so we can finally get to the bottom of this terrible scourge and deliver real accountability and justice for our veterans and their families.

The government has announced a new National Commissioner for Defence and Veteran Suicide Prevention, but it's clear this won't be better than a royal commission, as those opposite have claimed. It is not a genuine attempt to tackle this issue, in my view. One thing they could do right now is get on and roll out the veteran recovery or wellbeing centres, as they're called, across the country, like the one promised at the last election for my electorate of Solomon. We know that people can struggle if they have nowhere to go for help. Fifteen months down the track, we haven't got a general manager for the Darwin wellbeing centre as yet. I hope that Mates4Mates can find the right person soon. When they're finally up and running these veteran hubs are a good example of the types of services that will benefit greatly from the data we get from a new census question on ADF service, which will help inform and target the support we deliver to veterans on the ground when and where they need it. I thank the member for the motion and I commend it to the chamber.

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