Keith Wolahan (Menzies, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I begin by thanking the members who have spoken before me, in particular the member for Spence and his very generous acknowledgement of all the other veterans in the parliament. I didn't realise it was 21. You've done your homework, so thank you for that. And the also the member of Braddon, who spoke earlier. A lot of us will come in here with talking points, but sometimes the best contributions are straight from the heart, and he delivered it straight from the heart. I'm not Jewish, but a rabbi spoke to me recently when I was at a ceremony for an award that is given in the name of a Jewish Australian soldier who died. There's an award given to Jewish schools in his name. He said, 'If you speak from the heart, you'll connect to the heart.' I often think about him. We see those moments in the chamber and in other places, there's something about that connection that connects us as humans.

I am a veteran. It's not a badge I wear too often or even know what it means. When I read the interim report, and I've read it twice, a lot of it's not familiar to me because we all have different experiences. I was very fortunate. Unlike the member for Braddon, I haven't carried burdens from there, and that's often just the accident of the way your tours went and the circumstances of life. Another factor is I was also fortunate that I didn't start off as a regular soldier, like he did and many others did. I started off, like the member for Spence did, as a reservist. It's not for me to replace the findings of the royal commission, but one of the advantages of starting as a reservist and then going full time and then back to reserve is that I have a foot in both worlds. You go from conflict and combat overseas to putting the bins out very quickly. It's something that feels normal to us, but it's probably not normal to someone who signs up as an 18-year-old or 19-year-old and has this intense experience for many years, and then they're putting the bins out and getting yelled at by their partner, and the bills are coming in, and there are other pressures on life. That's really hard.

I had a taste of that on my second tour of Afghanistan when I came back. I was a platoon commander. We were in quite heavy contact in Kandahar province on a Thursday and we came back that night. On a Friday I was on a plane, from Tarin Kowt to Kandahar, three hours later from Kandahar to Al Minhad, six hours later to Darwin, however many hours it takes to Sydney and then to Melbourne. And each time you went to an airport, you lost more of your friends as they went to their own places. I went from a platoon of 30 and all the support staff—there were 80 of us outside the wire—to, I remember, walking out through that gate at Melbourne airport on my own.

I was so excited to see my wife and my then-two-year-old boy, and my wife was pregnant with our daughter, but I had this sense of loss that I went from this family of eight, as the member for Braddon spoke about, to my core family. I thought he said it beautifully: it is about family, and it's about the transition from one family to the other. I had that sense of grief.

Many others will know this who've been to the bar. I went to the bar readers' course on the following Monday. I had one world that had become normal to me and that I had a sense of comfort about, and then I went to another world that felt abnormal to me. Your fear becomes relative. My fear and my heart rate went up when we were doing practice moots and you had judges asking questions. I had to go lie down from it.

The human condition is that we're more resilient than we think, and we are a product of our experience, so something that's quite abnormal becomes normal very quickly. That's what we do to 18-year-olds or 19-year-olds. We take them from their families—they're just kids—and we shape them into soldiers and officers who are ready to do extraordinary things. To turn your back to gunfire because it might be coming from this direction, knowing the person next to you has your back—there's nothing like that. There is nothing like that.

I reflect on the experience of many others that I served with. I won't name him, but there's a very good friend of mine who had some horrible experiences overseas. He's a wonderful person, but on his tour there were civilian casualties—babies and children were killed—from decisions that he made, and he ultimately had a charge placed against him of negligence, which was the first time that was brought in a combat scenario. I was his barrister, defending him. It was where those two worlds crossed in a way that I didn't expect. The charges were ultimately dismissed, but I often reflect on: how do you go on, when you were the person who made the decision and had to carry those dead children out and then your country tells you, 'I think you're criminally liable for that,' and then you are acquitted? Yet he goes to work every day as a mechanic, because he doesn't want people to pity him or feel sorry for him.

Again, the member for Braddon summarised that so well. We often think of the cliche of the broken veteran, and so many are, and we've got to look after them, but there are a lot that just want to get on with life, even in the worst of circumstances. I often think of him when people say, 'You're busy today—you've worked hard as an MP.' I think, 'Well, I don't get up at 5 am and look up at oily cars dripping down in my face and try to solve problems like that.' He does it six days a week, and he's a wonderful person and served his country with distinction.

There were some really good recommendations in this report, and it's driven by the evidence that has been given by veterans who have had a personal experience, many similar to that and many for whom it's more the transition from that life of service and purpose to a normal life, which has its own challenges. I particularly like the recommendations about making the process simpler. No-one likes filling in forms. No-one likes red tape. That is supposed to be an article of faith of our party, and I'm really pleased to see that's a recommendation that the government is supporting. Of course we should make this process of getting help simpler.

In the final few minutes, I want to address some of the recommendations that it seems the government hasn't accepted and, again, we support you on that. They were the recommendations around parliamentary and public interest immunity. The Attorney-General said in an interview at the Press Club that he was baffled by those recommendations, and I was too. Our veterans put their lives on the line not only to fight for their friends, their family and their country but also for some of the great traditions of our democracy and the rule of law. Parliamentary privilege and public interest immunity, while they can be abused, are key institutions of our democracy and the rule of law. The commission, with respect, over-reached in asking for royal commissions to able to abrogate parliamentary privilege and public interest immunity.

The parliament has just signed off on an anticorruption commission. We welcomed that and supported that. But that commission will have authority over all of our ADF members, and there are enormous powers given to that commission. It may be in the future, if someone abuses that process, that they can come here and come to their member and get their voices heard. Parliamentary privilege is very important to our job. It should never be abrogated, so it wouldn't be in the interests of veterans or anyone to do that. Again, I commend the government for holding firm on that. It is very to say, when you get royal commission recommendations, 'We will implement them all.' That's very easy. But, in the end, they are recommendations, and the responsibility is on all of us to do the right thing by veterans, by our communities and by our democracy. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to this and thank you again to the members of Spence, Braddon and everyone else who spoke in this debate.

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