Matt Keogh (Burt, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Veterans’ Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

When we came to government there was a backlog of some 60-plus thousand claims in the Department of Veterans' Affairs. The DVA secretary said that, under the previous government's system, approach and resourcing for the department, that backlog would never have been cleared. We're spending more than $233.9 million on employing 500 frontline staff in DVA to clear that backlog. We've removed the staffing cap so that we can transition people from labour hire into being public servants. We're developing a pathway to simplify the legislation that applies to veterans while improving the IT systems in the department to make things easier to understand and make claims faster to process.

The previous minister threatened to quit, but he never even followed through on that commitment. When we turn to the area of defence personnel, our people are the most important capability for the defence of Australia and our national interest. Given the strategic circumstances we now face, the recruitment and retention of personnel has never been more important. So it's disappointing that under the previous Liberal government defence recruitment targets were missed time and time again and defence was haemorrhaging personnel. When the shadow minister for defence says that he's concerned about recruitment numbers, I'd tend to agree: it's not an easy fix after a decade of inaction—inaction under the previous Liberal government.

But what are we doing about these issues that we have inherited? Well, we are implementing our response to the Royal Commission into Defence and Veterans Suicide interim report. As I mentioned, we're investing $233.9 million in engaging 500 additional staff for DVA. We're investing $9.5 million in developing our new legislative pathway, $87 million to modernise IT systems, $24.3 million to provide increased and improved demand modelling for DVA so we can best understand the demand that it will be confronting, and $15.5 million in responding and assisting the royal commission.

Our budget just delivered also implements some of our election commitments: $46.7 million for 10 new veterans and families hubs across the country, in the areas where we see the highest concentrations of personnel and veterans; $24 million to deliver a veterans employment program; $4.7 million for the development of the Operation Navigator smartphone app; $97.9 million for the $1,000-a-year increase for the totally and permanently incapacitated payment, supporting some 27,000 veterans; and $46.2 million to boost defence and veteran homeownership.

We're working to improve the lives of defence personnel and their families as well. We understand the need to take action immediately. That's why we're working with defence to introduce new initiatives that will make the lives of personnel and their families just that little bit better. We will improve and increase access to education opportunities by expanding the Defence Assisted Study Scheme and study bank program. We will ensure ADF families can maintain a healthy lifestyle by doubling the payment and expanding the ADF Family Health benefit. We will recognise those who work in our most remote locations by increasing the allocation of remote locality leave travel by an additional trip per year. We will adequately compensate ADF members when they conduct higher duties by revising the current higher duties allowance policy. We're making it easier to conduct official travel by providing greater ease of access to travel allowances, and we're enabling everyone to easily understand the value of working for our Defence Force by developing and communicating a clear ADF employee value proposition framework for everyone to understand. These are just some of the things that we're doing to address the critical shortages and failures that we've inherited after a decade of the previous Liberal government being in charge of defence and veterans affairs.

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