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

I hear someone on that side scoff at that, and that's unfortunate. That's unfortunate, because what we saw over the years was a government—and the Leader of the Opposition, in fact, was a defence minister, and they did roll out the red carpets. Unfortunately, they didn't put enough money into capability. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming to having the Royal Commission into Defence and Veterans Suicide. They finally agreed to do it but then continued to underfund the services that veterans and their families relied on. That's how we ended up with a backlog of 42,000 Australian veterans waiting to get the support that they needed.

We've heard from the veterans minister himself previously—and this is not something that he has crowed about, but it is significant—that billions of dollars more were put into the budget to make sure that we continued to get rid of that backlog by helping Australian veterans. We funded 500 additional places to get on top of the claims and, now that we've done that, we're investing further with an additional 141 staff to process claims faster. But it's not just those on this side of the chamber. I think it was the member for Groom himself who said that he would leave the government should there not be sufficient funding put into the Department of Veterans' Affairs. He now sits over there on the crossbenches because those opposite, when they were in government, didn't properly fund the Department of Veterans' Affairs. With my own eyes I saw him stand up at a press conference and say that if those opposite, the government at the time, didn't put sufficient funding into DVA to deal with the 42,000—this was his own government he was talking about betraying veterans and their families by not putting enough into the services that they required. He now sits over there because he'd had an absolute gutful of that.

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