CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Despite the millions of dollars spent on endless inquiries into the institutional failings that have let down our most vulnerable returned servicemen since the Vietnam war, it can once again be confirmed that the Department Of Veteran Affairs is just as shithouse as it was 50 years ago.
In fact, recent statistics make the songs of Jimmy Barnes sound like a vast improvement on the current state of affairs for Australian veterans.
At least 1600 Australian veterans, the equivalent of the entire population of Deniliquin, have tragically died from preventable causes on home soil since 1997.
That’s more than twenty times the number of servicemen and women killed in active duty during that time.
The Morrison government’s reluctant Royal Commission into this catastrophic epidemic, which families of deceased defence personnell had spent decades begging for, is now finally due to release its final report by the end of the year.
But according to Senator Jacqui Lambie, the loudest advocate for Veterans in Parliament House, the commission has been having ongoing issues with government departments who are not making it easy to access the vital information needed to get answers.
For 50 years, the issues have remained the same. A disgraceful lack of mental health support for veterans, which dates back to the entire department actively denying the existence of PTSD in the years following the Vietnam War. But this is just one of many seemingly easy-to-fix issues that nobody wants to fix for our veterans. There’s also the issues surrounding the unprecedented rates of homelessness amongst veterans, the bureaucratic nonsense involved in actually sending DVA cards for veterans seeking healthcare, the horrific examples of veterans being overpaid in pension payments by the Morrison and then audited by the illegal robodebt algorithm and forced to pay back tens of thousands of dollars or face legal action.
In other news, the countdown is on for the rollout of Australia’s new nuclear-powered submarines, which will help us fighting our Pacific enemies underwater. They cost $400 billion dollars and won’t arrive until the mid-2040s. There will be 7 of them. They will not be built in Australia.
