CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
There have been calls for major change within the Australian Defence Force, as well as the agencies tasked with providing support to returned servicemen and woman, as the Royal Commission into Veteran Suicide returns their findings this week.
The Royal Commission recommended a new agency to support serving members as they transitioned into civilian life, because it seems that things have not really improved from the post-Vietnam misery that Jimmy Barnes sang about in Khe Sanh.
The report, which was tabled in parliament this week, makes 122 recommendations, calling for sweeping change to improve the health and wellbeing of the men and women who serve.
Among the recommendations is the establishment of a new agency to focus on veterans’ wellbeing, noting that the lacklustre Department of Veterans’ Affairs has neither the skills nor the funds to deliver the support that is needed. This is a particularly interesting finding, given the hundreds of billions that are spent on defence deals like AUKUS.
However, the inconvenient truth is that while the vast portion of Australian tax-payer dollars are spent sending young men and women to war, the amount of money that is dedicated to bringing them home and resettling them is minuscule in comparison.
Another cruel fact that has been unearthed is that between 1997 and 2021 – more than one veteran dies at their own hands each week, which is 20 times as many as the number of members killed in combat.
The Royal Commission has found that scouring our low socio-economic country towns and suburbs for patriotic young men and women, who are then given a gun and sent to a foreign land to fight in a foreign war that over a million of their fellow Australians have protesting against joining, doesn’t really benefit anyone but the politicians who are trying to get chummy with Republican US Presidents.
The wellbeing of these veterans only disintegrates further when they return home traumatised and injured, and are then made to spend hours waiting on the phone to hear from overwhelmed and underfunded government agencies, who only return their calls to accuse them of rorting welfare payments due to a illegal robodebt algorithm.
The overall finding is that sending young men and women to fight in wars that mean nothing to them or their country, before the government completely washes their hands of them, is not very good for mental health.
The Federal Government has said it would methodically work through the findings before providing a response “soon” – which is quite similar to the vague answers that veterans have been hearing from backlogged public servants for decades.
