Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

If 1,273 people died in a war between 2001 and 2019, it would be a tragedy that would be recollected and part of the fabric of this chamber from that time forward. If we had a terrorist attack and 1,273 people were killed, we would note it as a memorial around this building, like we have with others. Just for the record, between 2001 and 2019 the official number of suicides was 1,273 for serving and ex-serving members. This is a catastrophe for every family and for every family member that is a part of this. We are trying to work out why the rate amongst men is four times higher, we believe, than it is on civvy street. Amongst women who have served for a short time, it's vastly higher.

It's for this reason that people were driven towards a royal commission to try and get to the bottom of this. It was for this reason that people such as Julie-Ann Finney did so much work in coming to this building. She recollected her beautiful son, who committed suicide, and was amongst a range of people who came here to tell us about the pain they had endured. There was also Jesse Bird. There was also the advocacy work done by certain people like Heston Russell, who, from disparate and different corners, came to the same issue. We needed to get to the bottom of exactly what was going on here.

I'd like to acknowledge and congratulate the work that was done at that time, especially by the member for Wide Bay, Llew O'Brien, who obviously went against the stream to drive for a royal commission. It was the coalition that brought about the royal commission, but it took quite a bit of work. I acknowledge that. When we're talking about people's lives, we have to be very honest about everything that surrounds that. In the brief part I played at that time, I also said I would cross the floor to get this royal commission in place. I'd do that because I also come from a family where both my grandfathers served, my father served and I served. But that is not the issue. It's about trying to understand what happens and why. We've got to try and make sure that people, when they step out of the Defence Force, don't step off a cliff. I think in the future we need to try and help people to step down rather than out.

In April 2021, the royal commission was called for. We hope for a conclusion of this by 1 July 2026, when this is to be finally brought about. I must say that it would be better if this had been a little bit expedited and done in a more efficacious way. There is part and process. I know that we have 300,000 veterans, as I was enlightened by the department the other day, so we have 300,000 reasons in wanting to make sure that this process addresses their issues. It's something that probably doesn't touch on the general public, but for those in the public who have a mother, a father, a son, a daughter, a grandfather or someone else in their family who has served—every one of those 300,000 people have families—it is of absolute particular interest.

We have to realise that to try and get to the bottom of this, as the member for Wide Bay said, we needed a gold-standard inquiry to try and really dig down. The last 50 reports have something like 750 recommendations. To be quite frank, we hadn't got far enough with them. In fact, we hardly got anywhere at all, so we had to be logical and take the next step.

The first recommendation of the interim royal commission was a streamlining of the acts. There are three acts that people work under. There's the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation (Defence-related Claims) Act, known as DRCA; before that there was the Veterans' Entitlements Act, VEA; and there's the Military Rehabilitation and Compensation Act, known as MRCA. So we've got VEA, DRCA and MRCA. Under these three acts, there is a range of confusion. You have people who have done the same job, so it should be the same rate and same pay. If people have done the same job, they should be dealt with in the same way. Once you sign on the dotted line, you have given licence for you to lose your life on behalf of the country. The vast majority don't, nor do we want them to, but that is what they have offered. When people come back, they've all signed on the dotted line, and therefore they say: 'Why are you treating us differently? Our lives have the same equivalence. Why are we treated in a different form?'

What we have at the end of this is, overwhelmingly, a freezing of people's entitlements at where they were, with the exception of few—funeral benefits and exceptional disabilities. But, really, your entitlements in the VEA will stay where they are and not go down, your entitlements under DRCA will stay where they are and not go down, and your entitlements under MRCA will stay where they are and not go down and in a few instances go up to an equivalence. And then you'll have almost—and I argued with the department about this—a fourth act, which I'll call MRCA 2.0. You have people going forward on a new act, and over time there'll be an attrition of people under VEA and DRCA. So I still don't think we've got to a clean sweep of this.

I have to always be honest. There are a lot of recommendations and people lobbying for issues. We just don't have the money. It would be disingenuous of me to say that the coalition supports something that I know full well, should the tables be reversed, we couldn't—we wouldn't be able to get it through the Expenditure Review Committee. So we have to be realists. It's a $12-billion-a-year spend in Veterans' Affairs. It's one of the more substantial spends of government. It's substantial. We are dealing with people's lives. This is a classic example of how it affects people's lives. As I said, if there were an accident in Australia and 1,273 people died, it would be cataclysmic, but this has happened in the background, and we really didn't pay attention to it like we should have.

But we do need the minister to be in cabinet. That is vitally important. The nature of cabinet is such that, when you're there, there is horsetrading. If you help out another cabinet minister with a certain proposal, there's a belief, in a form of quid pro quo, that they will help you out. If the veterans minister is in cabinet, they can buy that goodwill around the cabinet table. They can say, 'I've helped you out; you help me out.' Therefore, the veterans get helped out because the minister has more goodwill in his kitbag to get something done about their issues. There's a minister for the republic; I don't quite know what they do. The Minister for Veterans' Affairs is sitting beside them, and that's not the right place for the Minister for Veterans' Affairs. They should be in cabinet—if nothing else, for the fiscal understanding that such a substantial amount of money is being spent. We should have had more consultation on this. There was supposed to be six months consultation but there were really only about six weeks. To try to alleviate that, we have the royal commission, of course, which will come down on 9 September, but we have a government-run Senate legislative committee which will come down on 3 October. It is very important for the veterans watching these to make sure that you segue into that and have a participation in that process and use that as another form of your engagement in this vital piece of legislation in your life. On the conclusion of that Senate inquiry, no doubt, both the government and the opposition will be coming back with further amendments, and that will be a discussion at a later date. What we're really doing here is introducing the bill, but it is in no way finalised. There is a lot of work to do, and that is very important.

If you know how veterans' affairs works—and my father was from New Zealand and part of veterans' affairs, and he got smashed up—it started in 1914. Before 1914, there were just benevolent funds where the public raised money to help people who would come back from wars. It was Billy Hughes at the time who gave a very good speech—it's on the Hansardbasically saying, 'We will look after you when you get back.' From that point forward, around about 1914 there was the war pensions act, and he gave a good speech, and around about 1917, I think—I'll be corrected on that—we started to lay down the path of how we come to have a veterans' affairs department and came forward with what we have got now. There have been a whole range of iterations of these acts. It's a continual sweeping-up process.

We have about 103,000 people on the gold card—it's 103,600 or something. The gold card gets you basically whatever medical benefits you want. There are a lot of people—veterans—who want to go onto the gold card, but, to be quite frank, we can't afford it. Once more, I'm trying to be very succinct and very honest, because I come from a family who have been in the military, and they want you to be straight with them. They would rather have the honest answer than have you beat around the bush. There's a white card that gets you a form of support, but not the total that the gold card gets. We have about 186,277 people on that, or something. This is one of the issues where a lot of people, in their discussions with my office, want to find out how they can get better coverage. If we put everybody on a gold card, it would be a multibillion-dollar ask from the expenditure review committee and that would not work.

We've got to look after veterans, and one of the crucial reasons for that is the circumstance which Australia now sees itself in for us—the majority of people in parliament—is vastly different to what our children and grandchildren will see. The world is changing. Totalitarianism is now on the rise. The proportion of the world living under totalitarian rule is increasing. Democracies, tragically, in many areas are on the wane, and you can see that with President Xi in China—it's a totalitarian regime, with military control—with Putin in Russia, with Iran and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, and even with other areas where they are going to form a quasi-totalitarianism with a sort of guise towards democracy but not really. The comparative power between places such as the United States and any threat has changed. The Pax Americana process also has pressures it has never had before. So Australia has to become as strong as possible as quickly as possible, and if we don't we are completely foolish. We will hand to your children a foot on their throats, because that will be the fruit of our indolence and our lack of capacity to recognise the threats that were imminent and that we can see on television every day but didn't do anything about.

But to do that we have to be strong in agriculture, in manufacturing, and our power prices have to be amongst the cheapest in the world, and of course we've got to have a strong defence force. Now, you're not going to have a strong defence force and get people into it unless they recognise that you look after them as they're coming out. That has to be a sales point of why you'd sign up: that if you get out, back onto civvy street, you're looked after. And why should you be looked after? That is because the threats associated with your going away or signing on the dotted line is that you might pay the supreme sacrifice and lose your life. That's part of it. That is a tragedy, and there are about 103,000 people's names on the War Memorial, at the other end of Anzac Parade, which is lined up right through the middle of this table here. If you go out through the front door, at the end of Anzac Parade is the War Memorial, and about 103,000 people have their name on brass there because they died for our nation.

Not only that, but especially after the First World War a lot of people died within a year of getting back. We never recognise them. I think there are about 30,000 of them, who died within a year of returning, and they're just as dead as anybody else. Part of that, of course, is that some have committed suicide. They don't get their names on a plaque, but we've got to recognise that if they hadn't served then they wouldn't have put themselves in that psychological predicament; they would have the same rate of suicide as in the general population, whereas for people who've served it's vastly higher.

But we should respect them not just because of that but also because some people were psychologically changed. There is a partial reprogramming of how their head works. I saw that among the friends of my father. There were things that we were just not allowed to say in the house; we were not allowed to ask questions about certain things. It was drummed into you: 'You will not ask questions about this.' Also, some people were physically maimed. My father had an anti-aircraft gun barrel dropped on his leg, and his life changed from that point forward. And they have a real anger about it—bitterness—about the disfiguration: going to the beach, people seeing them like that, a continual limp. They feel they were just dropped off and left behind. That's the big thing: they feel, 'We were used, abused and kicked out the door and left on the side of the football field as a sort of oddity, to watch other people play sport.'

And there's more than that, another reason you have to respect them. When people go away, families break up. A lot of families just don't work when the partner goes away. My grandfather walked out the door and came back five years later, in the First World War. For five years he just wasn't there. A lot of marriages don't survive that. They break up, and the kids have to deal with the affliction of basically being part of a single-parent family. That's part of their sacrifice and their service, and we've got to recognise that. Other people go away and, when they come back, all their mates have gone on in other careers, have gone on in their lives, have become successful. And you come back completely below where they are. You're sort of a tag-along, so you never really get to where they are, and you feel ripped off that other people have gone on in their lives, and you've been left behind.

This is why Veterans' Affairs is so important: because it fills that hole of understanding those issues and making sure that those people, as best as they can, catch up to where they would have been had they just stayed on civvy street, had they just looked after themselves and not signed on the dotted line to possibly get someone to shoot at them. This frustration becomes manifest when people start dropping out of the system. In my discussions with ex-service people—men, predominantly—I hear that it's the case that they go looking for their mates. People are talking to them. They have discussions. It's all very well, after they've been discharged. But then they just sort of fall off the phone line, and they slowly become less and less known. They become silent. Then their mates have to go looking for them and saying: 'How are you going? What are you up to? What's going on in your life?' It's a really bad sign if you are not engaged with other people, if you are not talking to other people and if you are self-medicating. You are doing all the wrong things. It is that sense of loss. It's that sense of loss of connection. It's that sense of: what is my purpose? In the Defence Force, the suicide rate as a serving member is lower than for civvy street. It's lower than in the general population. But it's vastly worse when you get out because there's a lack of purpose. You think: 'I was a soldier. I served. I had purpose. I wore a uniform. I had recognition for what I was and who I was when I went through the airport. Now, who am I? Who am I when I go down and have a beer or when I go to the pie shop? What am I anymore? What is my role? What happens now? Have I already retired? Is that it?'

This is something Veterans' Affairs has got to be mindful of. Hopefully this royal commission and the end of the Senate inquiries will bring all those things in. You will never remove suicide from the community. It is a tragic reality. But bringing that rate down to where it is in the general population will show that this chamber has done its job to bring this issue to some form of resolution, which is what we're all trying to do.

The three acts, as they become more aligned, we hope will remove the confusions and the frustration people have in wanting to get something resolved, dealing with the department and then just waiting in perpetuity for some outcome. It's going to be of real importance that the Senate inquiry gives ample time for people not just in the major capitals; it must also touch on regional areas. There has to be a capacity. We have a lot of veterans in places such as Wagga because we have the three arms of the Defence Force there. There are a lot of homeless people on the Gold Coast who have served because they gravitate to areas where they believe it's better than maybe Melbourne, like the Sunny Coast. They're obviously around Townsville. All these areas have to have their chance to have their say. The minister is here, and I appreciate that. That is going to be also incredibly important.

It's a tough issue, veterans' affairs, because as much as possible we don't want it to be partisan. I don't think people respect that. I think they want more of a unity ticket in how you deal with it. They want you to sort the issues out as best you can off the football paddock and not on it, and I have tried my best to do that. Obviously in these areas you have to show your diligence where you believe something needs to be fixed. You have to ventilate it; otherwise, people think you are just asleep at the wheel and not doing your job.

I would like to commend the minister because I think, on the whole, he has been very diligent on this issue. I want to commend him for being across his brief, which I think is very, very important. I hope the minister remains the minister and I hope he actually gets into cabinet. That would be of assistance to all.

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