Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I today rise to represent the 2,000 veterans and their families, and the 1,300 Australian Defence Force personnel who live in my electorate of Macquarie and to support this bill.

We are united in our respect for the many sacrifices these service men and women and their families make to serve our nation, regardless of whether they are deployed in active duty, in peacekeeping forces, in training, or logistical support at home bases. However, our support has not always translated into ensuring that our service men and women, and our veterans, are adequately cared for and protected.

With the indulgence of the House, I would like to recount some truly frightening statistics. The Department of Veterans' Affairs states that, as at March 2016, veterans serving in East Timor, on average, had 2.56 health conditions per veteran. For the Solomon Islands it was 2.10. For those who served in Afghanistan: 2.9. For those who served in the Iraq conflict: 2.56. Post-traumatic stress disorder tops the list in all conflicts, with nearly 3,000 veterans having ongoing issues with PTSD. Physical diseases are often easier to see. If we factor in all common mental illnesses and addictions—alcohol dependence and abuse, depressive disorders, adjustment disorder, anxiety disorder and psycho-active substance abuse—it is no small matter, and our veterans are facing serious issues when it comes to the prevalence of mental health conditions.

Even more worrying is the fact that the reporting of mental health issues relative to other conditions is so low, so the chances are that there are many more vets and personnel out there suffering from mental illness but not reporting it. This is not good enough. These men and women have put their life on the line for the defence of our country. In many cases, they are not getting the support and assistance they desperately need and deserve. I have many RSL sub-branches in my electorate from Richmond and Windsor, up the mountains from Glenbrook to Katoomba, and I also have the Blackheath and Mount Victoria Sub-branch, which I am very honoured to say I am patron of. I have the Springwood-based Vietnam Veterans Association in my electorate. I also have St John of God hospital at North Richmond, which is highly regarded for the incredible work that it has done over many years in helping veterans deal with their mental health issues.

Not an event occurs, whether it be Anzac Day, Vietnam Veterans Day, or most recently, Remembrance Day, without a conversation occurring around the impact of mental illness on the lives of families and returned service personnel. The same is true of interactions that I am unfortunate enough to have with the personnel at RAAF Base Richmond and RAAF headquarters Glenbrook. Twenty-two per cent of the ADF, or one in five, have experienced at least one mental health disorder in the last 12 months, and more than half have experienced mental illness during their life. This is a rate significantly higher than the rest of the community. More shockingly, 24 per cent of the individuals with an ICD-10 mental illness in the ADF reported feeling that in the previous 12 months life was not worth living. This is particularly concerning when your electorate has such a large number of personnel and returned personnel living in it. The Richmond RAAF base is the core part of the community. In the Hawkesbury, most people would be related to, know of, or be friends with members of someone in the ADF, or their children would go to school with the sons and daughters of Defence personnel. It would be much the same case in the Blue Mountains, and we have a very large number of young people who are part of cadets wanting to be part of the Defence Force as they get older.

So for me and my community, the issue of prevalence of mental illness in veterans and service people is not one that we discuss abstractly. It is an issue that can have wide reaching and devastating effects in our local area. It is an issue which affects not only the service personnel or veteran in question, but their friends, their family and our community. That is why I am so passionate about ensuring that our service men and women are given the best access possible to mental health services and preventative procedures. We owe it, not just to them, but to our communities to take action.

In May this year, I stood at McQuade Park in Windsor to honour the coming home of the remains of 33 veterans and dependants who died in the Vietnam conflict. Two veterans of the Blue Mountains were among those repatriated: Corporal Bob Bowtell and Private Ron Field, both educated at Katoomba High School. In August, I was privileged to attend, along with more than 200 people, a gathering at the Lawson War Memorial, a welcome home commemoration for them. What remains most vivid for me was the moving account of one of the mates of Bob Bowtell, who died from a lack of oxygen in the underground labyrinth of a Viet Cong tunnel in South Vietnam while on duty with the 3rd Field Troop of the Royal Australian Engineers 50 years ago. The memories of that night are clearly not far from their mates' minds. It remained a heavy burden for his friend to carry.

If you include all mental illnesses, the total list of Vietnam vets suffering from mental illness reaches more than 30,000 people. That is one mental illness for every two vets, a prevalence rate of 50 per cent. To quote Major General John Cantwell:

We cannot underestimate the damage that we might be doing to our people through constant stress. We must do everything we can to help them out psychologically with medical care, with everything. These people are putting their lives on the line, they do this without question. They don't flinch and when they hurt, when they are hurting as they will down the years, we've got to keep stepping up as a society and look after them.

He is right. We owe this to our veterans. We owe this to their family and friends.

The ADF has been engaging in a constant consultative process to devise best practice responses to mental illness amongst deployed and domestic personnel. However, these attempts are worthless unless we pledge to make the necessary legislative changes. So many ADF personnel simply do not seek help. The reasons they give—27 per cent say they do not want to be treated differently, and another 27 per cent say they do not want it to harm their career. These were the highest rated perceived stigmas. The highest rated barrier though to seeking help at all would be that it reduces deployability. We need to provide tangible support to assist the ADF and veterans so that they have easier access to mental health facilities and prevention strategies. This bill certainly goes some way to do just that and I am, therefore, very proud to support it.

The provisions within schedule 2 of the bill extend the eligibility for non-liability health care, allowing personnel to take part in early intervention strategies sooner. It does away with the need for personnel to have engaged in three years continuous full-time service. They do not need to lodge an application and receive a diagnosis before accessing the appropriate support. Under these changes, groups of veterans who did not make three years' service—and that includes women who face sexual and personal harassment in the ADF and, as a result, left before three years of service—will now be able to access mental healthcare services. Essentially, ADF members no longer have to jump through bureaucratic hoops, as a result of the provisions within schedule 2. This is a good first step to ensuring that ADF personnel are able to access mental health services in the first place and that reporting rates may be improved. This will make a real and positive impact in my electorate, and it is a change I strongly welcome.

This bill is particularly important in the context of Remembrance Day, where this year we not only marked the anniversary of the guns falling silent on the Western Front—which is, in itself, a significant day for me, as I had two grandfathers fighting on the Western Front: Leslie Robert Templeman and Herbert Raymond Axtens—but also ensured the day highlighted the suicide rates of veterans and Defence Force personnel, which is a significant step to lifting the stigma on mental illness that makes it so much harder to address.

I commemorated Remembrance Day at Glenbrook, Colo Heights, Freemans Reach and Windsor, as well as at the service that we had here the day before Remembrance Day. Now, more than ever, I am reminded that Remembrance Day must be more than just a mere token; it must be more than a minute of silence, and more than just a fixture in our calendars. I hope it continues to be a day to honour those who have served, and to wholeheartedly pledge to ensure that our current and future generations of service men and women are cared for and protected in return for their service to our nation. Our commemoration for those soldiers who have made the ultimate sacrifice means nothing unless we actively seek to ensure that those who serve and survive do so with good health, both physical and mental.

I am proud to support this bill, in the name of the serving and former personnel in my electorate and their families, friends and loved ones. I am proud to support it on behalf of RSL sub-branches all across my electorate. This bill will ensure that 67,000 additional members of the ADF are able to access quality health care for mental health conditions. No longer will they need to jump through an obscene number of hoops; nor will they be excluded from NLHC coverage because of the length of their service. This is a priority area for Labor, and we will continue to work cooperatively with the government in this parliament to explore what more can be done to support those who have served and fought for our country. I urge all members to support this bill.

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