Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a number of speakers have already noted, the Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (Further 2008 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2008 is an omnibus bill. When it was initially referred to the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs, there was very little comment made about the immunisation allowance or about changes to child support. What was brought to the attention of committee members, through great numbers of letters and emails from the veterans community and from the spouses and partners of veterans, was their concerns about schedule 2 of this bill. I would particularly like to thank the community affairs committee for taking the late reference of schedule 2 of the bill into consideration. In fact, it became our major focus during our hearing on the subject.

There are two points that I think are of particular relevance, from the number of submissions that we received in this area and the number of letters and emails that I know senators received from people in the veterans community. As Senator Moore has pointed out, from the figures that are available, it would appear that there are 580 separated spouses who are affected by this legislation. That is not by any means a large number, and yet the amount of work that was done by people in the veterans community and in the RSL community I think demonstrates the great strength of their sense of extended family within that community. I think it also underlines the somewhat mean-spirited nature of the government’s intentions with this legislation. If we look at the figures that the government are now putting out to back this bill, they are suggesting that it might save a maximum of $3 million over the financial year, with savings of less than $1½ million over the following three years. It is hardly going to revolutionise the world, but it is potentially going to turn the lives of 580 women—because most of these people are the separated wives of veterans—upside down. I would also like to comment on the efforts of the Greens to ameliorate some of the worst aspects of this bill. We will get into discussions about that during the Committee of the Whole stage.

The evidence that we had in letters and all manner of emails told us over and over that this is a very special cohort within our community. These are not the same people who go through the Family Court in relation to separation at any other time. I have had letters from women who have left their marriage because of the extreme violence involved but have then gone back. Some even divorced their husbands but later remarried them. They love them but they just cannot live with them. Some letters have said that it is not uncommon for a wife to be the carer even though the couple have been separated for years, and some wives who have left their husbands have returned to nurse them when they have become extremely ill. As I said earlier, some women have even divorced the veterans but have gone on caring when they have become very ill.

I think that we really need to concentrate on the reasons for these stop-start relationships, which I do not think the legislation still properly appreciates. It is because of the trauma suffered by these men during their time in war. I will read out the letter that best expressed this, but I will use different names because she asked to keep the names confidential.

My name is Mary. I am now 59. I married a great young man in 1967, and we had a three-year-old son when my husband went to Vietnam in 1970-71. He came home to me a totally different person, and we soon found out he had turned into a violent man. We had two more children and had another 30 years of living with this violence since he returned home. I couldn’t take it anymore after he attacked our daughter and broke her leg.

I loved my husband, and I still do, in a strange way, but I had to leave him for my own safety. I have phone calls from him even now, and he still visits. We are not divorced. If he is ill, I go to see him. The decision to take the service pension away from women who had to leave due to their husband’s illness will affect me greatly.

I think that we could quite easily assume that, if we change the legislation so that the partners of people who are recognised as having post-traumatic stress disorder are excluded from the pension, we fix it, but in fact we do not. If you look through the evidence that has been given over and over, in emails and letters, and if you look at the information from the Partners of Veterans Association, it tells us that in virtually all cases these men will not seek assistance or assessment. They will often refuse to see that they are the ones with the illness and they refuse to be treated. We could say, ‘That is a big problem for the people involved, isn’t it?’ But it is the wives who, over and over, have for 20, 30 or 40 years cared for these people who are punished for the fact that their veteran husbands may not be well enough to even recognise that they need assistance, assessment or help. We have to work harder, in my view, to find a solution that assists these people.

I think we also need to have a look at the numbers involved. I have spoken a little bit about the miserable million dollars or so that would be saved if the amendments that are now proposed by the government were to go through. If we look at the numbers who would be affected by the changes, there are, as Senator Moore pointed out, 580 separated wives who are caught up in this. Of those women, 265 are between 58½ and 63 years, 240 are between 50 and 58½ years, and 75 are under 50 years. Of greatest concern is that, out of those 580 women, 362 are married to veterans who have an accepted diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. So 362 of the 580 might be covered by the proposed amendments. That leaves 218 who are not covered. This is a very big, very mean stick to be wielding at 218 women who are separated from their veteran husbands who are not diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder. From the information that we have received, these are men who, in the main, will not agree to accept the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. How much do we save by wiping those 218 women off the bill? We save $56.40 a week for each one of them. As I said, this seems like a very big and very blunt instrument to be using.

We have heard some comments today that this is an excellent move in a social sense, because it saves these women from receiving any entitlement simply because they are the partner of someone. It assesses them as an individual. The problem, of course, is that the reason that they need this support is because of that partnership and because—I do not think this is drawing too long a bow—of the service that they have given in supporting their veteran husbands in very trying, very violent and very difficult circumstances. Let us turn this around and look at it from the point of view of the RSL, who are very concerned, as are the partners involved, at what they perceive to be the civilianisation of their benefits. Service personnel do not receive pensions because they need them. They receive them because, as a country, we have the view that we owe veterans and their families a pension or an entitlement because of the service they have done for us. It is about a debt that we need to repay. It is not about a welfare assistance, as the Centrelink benefits such as Newstart would be. That is where we would be sending these women who are perhaps in their mid-50s and have cared for husbands who were extremely unwell and have raised children in households that were sometimes very difficult. We would be sending these women off to go onto Newstart. In my view, that is an appalling travesty, given the service that they have done for us and for Australia.

It would be lovely to be able to say, ‘We are doing this for the good of these women.’ If we are, they are not very pleased about it. Let us look behind the reasoning that is there and genuinely understand their views on this issue. The Partners of Veterans Association of Australia has commented that these changes to the service pension for partners are a ridiculous exercise in futility with very little financial gain for the government, with additional cost of administration, turning on its head the whole issue of moving veterans’ entitlements to welfare status. There is in the veteran community an extraordinary upswelling of support for these women, but there is also the concern that this is the Labor government’s thin end of the wedge. If these sorts of entitlements can be twisted into being seen as welfare entitlements, what will happen over time as the government chips away—as we have seen here, not even for a major degree of savings—at the rights of the veteran community and those who support them? As Senator Scullion has pointed out, we will be opposing parts of schedule 2 in this bill.