Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

The treatment of our veterans is an area that I do not believe gets enough attention. It is talked about from time to time but, given how much public and political debate there is about defence matters and deployment of defence personnel, I think it is a serious problem and we do not give adequate attention to what many veterans go through once they come back to Australia, particularly once they have retired from the defence forces.

I am the first to acknowledge that many veterans are treated very well through the various entitlements that they receive but I believe there are still far too many who are not treated as well as they should be. That does not mean that every complaint that everybody has got is valid or every concern should be met. But this is an area where we simply must accept that we have an extra obligation to people. There is a unique aspect to joining the defence forces: being willing to fight for your country and participate in peacekeeping activities in our region. Even the training for these sorts of activities can be extremely dangerous. There needs to be a greater willingness to act promptly with regard to veterans’ concerns.

People would be aware, for example, of the longstanding controversy over the use of Agent Orange and the impacts of that in Vietnam, and the longstanding controversies over the impact on veterans’ children of service in Vietnam through Agent Orange and other things. There has been progress on that but it has been terribly slow and extraordinarily stressful for the veterans.

We have had the more recent example of the F111 deseal-reseal circumstance—a reminder that it is not just veterans who serve offshore on what is known as active service and whose health can be compromised and damaged by being part of the services. That is an area where people have had to fight much harder than they should have just to get recognition. There seems to be too much of a continuing attitude of almost a reversal of the onus of proof. I am not saying that we should let anybody claim anything but, given what so many veterans have gone through, I am saying that we need to have an attitude that is far less suspicious and looking for opportunities to deny entitlements. That is an attitudinal problem that cannot just be addressed by changes to the act or the law.

This is particularly important because I think we still are not fully appreciating the mental health impacts of a lot of military service. That is much harder to measure than broken legs and other physical injuries. In part because of that it is much harder to directly link it to the service and that is always going to be the case. That should not be used as a reason, I believe, for not providing adequate assistance and recognition. For a whole bunch of reasons, not just political or financial but cultural reasons within the military itself, we have continued to under-acknowledge and under-recognise the psychological impacts of military service. We need to improve that, particularly when people are seeking to get assistance through the veterans’ department and veterans’ review mechanisms. They are often traumatised and going through difficulties in adjusting and I do not believe our review process takes that sort of issue into account adequately enough. These are not just immediate social justice issues for people. We should all support them regardless of what our views are about particular individual military deployments. We do not want to have people in the armed forces as the political meat in the sandwich in those circumstances. Across the spectrum we should be prepared to support our service personnel, particularly when they have come back from active service, and I do not think that we do that well enough yet. There have been improvements, and that is welcome, but I think that we have room for improvement still. (Time expired).

Question agreed to.