Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the last week, around my electorate and other parts of Sydney, I have seen some rather large billboards being placed up, and these remind us of the significant problem that we have in our nation of the suicide rates of our returned servicemen. The facts which they quote are that since 1999, while we have had 46 Australian soldiers tragically killed on active service, in the same period of time we have had 239 returned soldiers take their own lives. In that period, we have lost five times as many servicemen on home soil as we have lost on the battlefield. So it is no wonder that so many of our returned services groups were so outraged earlier this year when retired former General Morrison, in his Australian of the Year acceptance speech, placed a higher prior on lobbying for the republican movement and ethnic and gender diversity than he did on this alarming epidemic rate of suicide of troops formerly under his command.

These billboards were installed by a charity called Walking Wounded, and on their website they state:

Walking Wounded … has been established to assist in the psychological rehabilitation and recovery of returned Australian soldiers who are experiencing hardships after their time in service. Our primary objective is to intervene and prevent the concerning incidences of suicide in the young veteran community through counselling and other support. We show them that there is 'life after the Army'.

I am not a psychologist, but I would suggest the reason we are seeing this significant rate of increased suicide amongst our ex-military personnel, which we have not seen in the past, is that in previous wars—in World War I and World War II—it was effectively all in. Everybody would have known somebody that fought in the war, and when the soldiers returned they would have easily conversed and interacted with other returned soldiers. But today we only have a small fraction of our population that we call on to fight our wars. While we are enjoying a party lifestyle of cafes, restaurants, bars and going out, we are completely isolated from the hardships that our soldiers are undergoing as we call on them to kill in our name. When the soldiers return, it is clear that we simply do not have enough detraining to equip those soldiers for normal civilian life.

There was a recent article on the ABC website where they asked the question about the returned soldiers, and they said, 'If I'm not a soldier, who am I?' They quoted a returned serviceman who said—and I quote his exact words:

What I did over there—

talking about Iraq and Afghanistan—

mattered … I had a prominent job, I enjoyed what I did. When I came home all that went away. I didn't really have any self worth anymore.

Another said:

I did become just another number. You lose a sense of purpose, your identity.

The American author David Swanson has talked about this, because they are having exactly the same problem in the USA. He said:

You can't kill and face death and return unchanged to a world in which you are expected to refrain from … violence and relax.

That brings me to the Veterans Motorcycle Club, formerly the Vietnam Veterans Motorcycle Club, which has operated from premises in my electorate at Menai for a number of years.

The Veterans Motorcycle Club play a very important role in providing a support network to ensure that our at-risk ex-servicemen are in regular contact with other ex-servicemen who understand what they have been through and what they are experiencing and help them work through their mental health issues. But I am sad to report to the House that they are being evicted from the premises that they are currently in—they have been there for over a decade—which are owned by Ausgrid, Australia's largest electricity supplier, a company that has over $3 billion in revenue. It is evicting them. They have been given a notice that they need to quit the premises. Unbelievably, they have been asked to quit the premises on 30 April, just a few days after Anzac Day.

I understand that companies like Ausgrid need to try to make every dollar that they possibly can. I understand that they are trying to fatten up their profits for a public sale for the New South Wales state government. But they also have a social responsibility. Ausgrid, in their statement of business ethics, even talk about 'a commitment to conducting business according to the highest ethical standards', and they talk about treating all people with respect, dignity, fairness and equity and being socially responsible. It is not socially responsible to ask a group of ex-servicemen to quit the premises that they are in a few days after Anzac Day.

I spent some time on the weekend talking to these ex-soldiers. They told me firsthand that the club had saved their lives. They told me that, if it were not for the club, they would not be alive today. They told me stories about the difficulty that they have fitting back into society after coming back from fighting on our behalf. I spoke to their wives, and they told me that when their husbands are at that club they know their husbands are safe. I heard from one: 'The only place he ever gets to sleep soundly, after returning from Afghanistan, is in the premises of that club.'

If Ausgrid really need these premises, they should simply give these guys time to try to locate alternate premises, assist them with their move and be that good corporate citizen that many of these large companies talk about being. We owe it to our ex-servicemen. We need to stand with them. We seriously have a problem, not only here in Australia but in many of the Western democracies today. We see a similar pattern in the UK. We see a similar pattern in the USA. There is an epidemic of suicide amongst our ex-servicemen.

If we are going to spend billions of dollars or hundreds of billions of dollars, which we do to protect our troops and our servicemen when they are in the field, we need to do everything we can by investing to protect them when they return home. We need to have programs in place so that, when they leave the military services, there are programs equipped to get them back, fit them into society and get them into important jobs. Perhaps those programs need to start even before we send them off into conflict.

It is very easy to look at the veterans motorcycle gang and see them with what we call 'bikie patches' and think these people are outlawed, but they are not. They are people who we in our society owe an obligation to because of what they have done for our nation. I call on Ausgrid—the board and the chairman—to do the right thing by ex-military personnel, even if it costs a few dollars. That is what the corporate responsibility of our large companies should be. They could not do anything better than to help the Veterans Motorcycle Club.