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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the minister's explanation.

It's been nine days now since the report of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide was released. The report was released last Monday. On Friday, you decided in your wisdom that you'd also release the alleged war crimes report right in their faces—how insensitive—and then we had the debacle that this has been. This report on the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force has actually been on the royal commission website since May, so saying it never should have been on there—that's rubbish.

My other problem is I've got the original one that's off the website, which the commissioners have actually redacted for publication. There are names redacted from it—not a problem there. However, I noticed that little redacted thing that you gave me yesterday is now missing. Yes, that's now missing.

So I've got to ask why you're trying to cover this up. This is dreadful—to hit the panic button and take it down. I tell you what's even more astounding is that there's nothing in that report. So you get it out there, and Defence goes, 'We've got a problem. We've got a problem here. Pull it down.' It's straight to cover-up, straight to a slap across those veterans' faces. Three years of coming forward, showing courage, telling their stories, putting their families through all this stuff again, and this is what's going on. The first thing you do when you're alerted is pull it down. I just don't understand why it would even be pulled down.

I haven't checked this morning, but I hope it's back up there, because it should be, because there is nothing in this report that we haven't already heard from the royal commission. And I tell you why. It's because your government only gave Justice Kerr three months to get this done over the Christmas period, and yet your minister's had it for six months. As I think my request this morning was, I want to know who the minister has consulted and when he consulted them. I didn't hear that. I'm pretty sure that was in my request. I want a list. I want to see what he's been doing in the last six months—why this report was just sitting there. I need to know what the situation is today.

The way you guys have handled yourselves in front of veterans in the last nine days has been extremely hurtful. The damage that you have done has been disgraceful. It's been so insensitive. But, what's even worse, you want to fight over this? You want to fight over this when it's quite clear that it says basically the same thing the royal commission does—that the IGADF is not fit for purpose. Our military justice system has been killing our own, those that have served. We've heard the stories. So this is what we need to do. We need to remove it from Defence because Defence cannot police itself; it fails to do so. That's the big story here. But instead of saying, 'Hey, Mr Gaynor, you're going today'—he has no conscience and he hasn't put in his resignation.

So the hurt that is running around that veterans community, when no heads up at the top have rolled—none of those big senior commanders up there can see that they were part of this problem, especially over the last 10 years. They do not see fit to resign because they failed to do the job and they were part of taking veterans' lives. That's the big issue today. Nor have I seen your minister have any courage to say, 'You're all getting warnings'—who's getting warnings; who's going?—or at least make phone calls and say, 'I want your resignation tomorrow, mate.' I can tell you that, if you have a minister saying, 'I want your resignation tomorrow,' I doubt there's going to be much argument, because that would be shameful. I would hope that some of those big senior officers up there would have a little bit of conscience and shame still left within them.

Until you start doing something, showing that you are actually going to take a big stick to this and you are going to take some of those awards off them—because apparently they were so great with their personnel!—no veteran's going to take you seriously. The sad point is—a mate rang me up this morning, he said, 'I'm really sorry; I know how much work you've done and what's happened here'—