Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Defence (Senator Reynolds) to a question without notice asked by Senator Lambie today relating to the mental health of veterans.

Six months ago the Prime Minister announced he was going to give us something bigger and better than a royal commission into veteran suicides, but it wasn't ready to go yet. He said, 'While we wait, let's start with an interim commissioner instead'—someone who would start immediately, somebody who would report within 12 months. Today, 200 days later, nobody has started, there's no report six months away and there is no interim commissioner at all. Two things are possible: either the interim commissioner was ready to go immediately or they weren't.

Imagine you're running late for work. Your boss calls you, asking, 'Where are you?' You apologise: 'Sorry, mate. I'm on my way.' You say to your boss, 'I'm leaving immediately, right away.' Six months later your boss calls you, asking where you are. You say to your boss: 'Guess what. I haven't left yet, mate, but I'm getting ready to go. I'll be there soon.' You reckon you'd still have a job? You can't turn up to work 200 days late and expect there'll be a job for you when you finally arrive. Not only has our interim commissioner not turned up; we don't even know who it's supposed to be—who should have turned up and who hasn't. If a person goes missing for six months, you'd assume that they're long dead and buried. The interim commissioner has been missing for six months and nobody has noticed. You want to know why? It is because this isn't a job anybody got asked to fill in the first place. That's the reality. Instead of doing what hundreds of thousands of Australians have begged for it to do, the Morrison government has gone and done something completely different. It is not just something different; it is something worse.

Are we surprised? He leads the same Liberal Party that's been waiting over a year to respond to the Productivity Commission's scathing criticism of the Department of Veterans' Affairs because he cares so much about veterans. That's the report that said the Department of Veterans' Affairs was so unfit for purpose that we should just tear it down and start again, and I can assure you that nothing has changed. It's the same Liberal Party that, for nearly a year, sat on an independent review saying that Teddy Sheean deserved a Victoria Cross, denying a hero the honour he deserved because they didn't think it was a priority.

We've got a government that doesn't have a national commissioner, doesn't have an interim commissioner, doesn't have terms of reference, doesn't have a starting date and doesn't have a final reporting date, but what it does have is an absolute certainty that, no matter what it's going to do, it will be bigger and better than a royal commission. For six months we've been waiting for the interim commissioner to start 'immediately'. When the government claimed it was ready to go immediately, it wasn't even ready to pick someone who was ready to go. It had nobody lined up. It had no terms of reference lined up. It had absolutely nothing—no work, no substance, no nothing.

The national commissioner doesn't have the power, flexibility, independence or authority of a royal commission. They're a commissioner who's been granted the stamp of approval from the Australian Defence Force and the Department of Veterans' Affairs—the very institutions that an independent royal commission would examine. You don't give witnesses the ability to choose the questions they're asked, and you don't give the Department of Veterans' Affairs or the Australian Defence Force the ability to choose the questions they're asked, either. The fact that we've done that is reason enough to oppose it. Since February we've been waiting for the interim commissioner, but what's more disturbing is that you'll get a commission that's a hack job instead of a royal commission that's the real deal, which is what should have been given to veterans in the first place.

Question agreed to.