Alan Griffin (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tim McCombe OAM died of a heart attack on 31 January 2015. Tim served in Malaya and Borneo during the Indonesian Confrontation and then went to Vietnam. He was seriously wounded as a result of a mine explosion. He lost one leg above the knee; the other was saved but he needed a brace as support for the rest of his life. Tim spent some 12 months in hospital and a year-and-a-half in rehabilitation. But, as is so often the case, the trauma of the event left psychological scars as well. The reduced mobility, the pain and the psychological damage later led Tim into some years of depression and despair. He dropped into a black hole, he later related, and wondered whether he would ever emerge. But emerge he did.

Tim was, for 20 unbroken years, the national president of the Vietnam Veterans Federation. This record shows the high regard in which he was held by the membership. But Tim's contribution to the veteran community began much earlier, in 1981, when he joined the band of Vietnam veterans renovating the storeroom at the back of an old Granville RSL hall. There he joined the newly formed Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia, counselling sick and troubled veterans, campaigning for the establishment of counselling centres and seeking recognition of the harmfulness of exposure to Agent Orange.

Tim became a pension officer and an advocate at both the VRB and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. When the Vietnam Veterans' Counselling Service was established in 1982, Tim was appointed a member of the supervising National Advisory Committee. He maintained a strong and active interest in its functioning till his death. When the Royal Commission on the Use and Effects of Chemical Agents on Australian Personnel in Vietnam—the Agent Orange royal commission—was established in 1983, Tim spent hundreds of hours in the veterans' royal commission office assisting the lawyers to prepare the case.

But it was after the royal commission that Tim came into his own. Unhappy that the royal commission findings had not encouraged the acceptance of Agent Orange compensation claims, Tim, now the national president of the VVF, began sponsoring appeals. By the early nineties, Tim had sponsored a score of successful Agent Orange cases at the VRB and at the AAT. This was a remarkable achievement that marked Tim as a major force in the veteran community.

Since that time, Tim had been closely involved in every important veterans' issue. Memorably, for 10 years he relentlessly pushed the case for fair indexation of the TPI and other veterans' disability pensions. He successfully pursued appeals against decisions of the Repatriation Medical Authority, even taking one appeal through Federal Court hearings. He lobbied for privacy for counselling centre clients, leading to extensive renovations to some centres. Notably, Tim always considered the families as equal victims of war's trauma and fought for that recognition.

The list of Tim's campaigns, many successful and some still ongoing, is a long one—too long to discuss here. Suffice to say that for 30 years Tim was a tiger in his fight against what he saw as injustice and was a campaigner for better treatment and benefits for veterans and their families. He explained that having been through those dark years he became determined to help others suffering war trauma. The veteran community will miss him.

I offer my condolences to his family, Tram, Craig and Stephanie. In my time as Minister for Veterans' Affairs, Tim fought hard for veterans—as hard as anyone did. But he was also always a straight shooter who had integrity—more integrity, I have to say, than many others I have dealt with over the years. May he rest in peace. A Veteran has died. A great Australian has died.