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

When we came to government, DVA, the Department of Veterans' Affairs, was chronically underfunded. That's why this budget, handed down by the Treasurer a few weeks ago, is a further example of the Albanese Labor government's commitment to making sure that our veterans and their families get the support and benefits not only that they need but that they deserve.

When we came to government, some 42,000 claims with the Department of Veterans' Affairs had not even been allocated to somebody within the department to look at. That backlog was causing anguish and distress for our veterans and their families. It meant that claims were taking years to assess and years to process. As the member for Calare, the former Minister for Veterans' Affairs in the former government, pointed out, this was because the former government was 'only prioritising funding that had a political advantage', which points out the complete lack of faith and the complete lack of support that the previous government had for veterans and the way in which they didn't prioritise what they needed.

When we go back to what we inherited and what that meant for processing times, it meant that, for an initial liability claim under the Military Rehabilitation and Compensation Act—this is one of the three pieces of legislation that supports our veterans' entitlements system—which is the most common claim that the Department of Veterans' Affairs has to deal with, it was taking on average 332 days just to allocate the claim for somebody to look at. It meant that the total processing time was some 441 days.

In our first budget in government, in October 2022, we funded an additional 500 staff for the Department of Veterans' Affairs. In this budget, handed down just a few weeks ago, we funded an additional 141 permanent staff for the Department of Veterans' Affairs. This is because we're not just committed to getting rid of the backlog; we're committed to making sure that we keep it gone and that we bring down processing times.

Now we're able to show that all claims that are lodged with the Department of Veterans' Affairs will be looked at by somebody within 14 days, and that's averaging, since December, at just six. It also means that, when we look at the time from December through to the end of April, we are averaging a total processing time of just 60 days. That's down from 441 days to just 60 days.

Of course, thousands of veterans have had to wait longer than that because their claims were stuck in that backlog that we inherited from the previous government, but we have now eradicated that backlog. Those claims are being processed. Some of those claims are taking time to process because, as you would expect, things have evolved over quite a while in their claims and in their conditions—in the years that their claims were sitting in that backlog. So further information has been required and further tests need to be undertaken, but we're getting about doing that job.

We also saw a situation which made this problem worse where a third of the people involved in processing claims were labour hire. For them it meant they had no job security, which also meant that they would leave frequently—understandably. But, when it takes six months to train a delegate, that continual churn of labour hire was inhibiting the effectiveness of the department. Now there are just 10 labour hire personnel in all of claims processing. That means we are a much more effective team. Processing this backlog means that veterans are getting what they need and deserve. That means that in this budget we are spending an additional $6.5 billion on benefits and support going to veterans and families, and we don't shy away from that; that is a good thing.

But the reason for that is the built-up demand of veterans and families not getting the support they should have received if the department had been properly resourced by the previous government. Yet the Leader of the Opposition, in his budget reply speech, said that we should be cutting back on this expenditure, that we should be cutting back on these staff numbers that are actually there to make sure veterans and families get what they need and deserve. Shame.

See this speech in context