Jo Briskey (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party) | Hansard source

The Flem/Ken RSL is a small but mighty subbranch down the south end of my electorate. I've stopped by a couple of times, and after one visit a conversation really stuck with me. We got to talking about their welfare program, which is mostly a few volunteers and a lot of phone calls, and one of them said that the part of the job that wears them down the most isn't the veteran who comes in asking for help. It's the one who never comes in at all—the veteran who's been sent back and forth between Defence and the Department of Veterans' Affairs, asked for the same three forms and somewhere in there has quietly decided the whole thing just isn't worth the trouble. Flem/Ken go and find them. They make the call nobody else makes. Today, the Defence Legislation Amendment (RCDVS Implementation and Related Measures No. 2) Bill 2026 is seeking to take that responsibility off their shoulders.

I've thought about that conversation a fair bit because there is a lot of talk about veterans falling through the cracks as if somebody just didn't care enough. That's not what's going on. The people at the Department of Defence care, the people in DVA care, the volunteers at the RSLs in my community care, and our government cares. The parts of the system meant to catch a person have never been allowed to talk to each other. Defence holds half of someone's story, and DVA holds the other half. The veteran ends up stuck in the gap between holding both halves on their own right at the point in their life when they've got the least left to hold anything with. This bill intends to close that gap. That's at the heart of it.

Underneath the five schedules and all the clauses, what it does is let the system share what it knows about a person so it can act before things get to the worst point. This is the next step on a road that this government has been walking deliberately and at pace since the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide handed down its final report. This bill forms part of this important work. The royal commission was a long and painful reckoning. It found what families had been saying for years, what the welfare officers at Flem/Ken RSL see each week, that suicide in the veteran community is not a private clinical tragedy that happens one person at a time. It is systemic. It is a product of culture, policy and the friction between institutions that were never built to hand a person gently from one to another.

The royal commission made 122 recommendations. This government accepted the overwhelming majority of them, agreeing or agreeing in principle to 104. By the end of last year, 32 were implemented. By the end of this year, we expect roughly two-thirds will be. This is not a government that received a report, thanked the commissioners and put it on the shelf. This is a government working through it, recommendation by recommendation, because the families who gave their evidence deserve nothing less than that we actually do the things they have asked us to do.

This bill enables 35 of those recommendations, it directly implements 15 and it supports a further 20. It is built across five schedules. The biggest thing this bill does is let defence and DVA share what they each know about a person. Right now, a veteran leaving the Defence Force has to arrive at DVA and tell their whole story over again to a department that already had every word of it sitting in a file somewhere else. So what the system currently does is make a person who is already struggling prove their own pain twice. This bill ends that. The information goes with the person. The handover happens on their behalf. DVA can reach out before someone's in crisis instead of waiting for them to find the strength to ask.

The rest of the bill follows the same instinct, which is to treat the whole of a person's life as the thing we're responsible for, not just the parts that are convenient. It puts the defence health system on a proper footing so risks get spotted early. It makes sure that, when a relationship ends in violence, a partner doesn't lose their support overnight, so leaving can be done safely. And, yes, it means a member sentenced to prison for serious violence or a sexual offence is discharged full stop—because the people who serve deserve to know who's standing next to them.

I know there are members in this place who will worry about the information-sharing powers, and I don't dismiss that worry, because it comes from good instinct. A person's health is their own. Their service record is their own. The state holding that information and moving it around is not a thing any of us should wave through without a thought. But I'd say two things. Firstly, the safeguards in this bill are written through it, with the conditions on use, the ministerial guidelines and the Information Commissioner overseeing everything. Secondly, the status quo is not neutral. The wall between defence and DVA was never a privacy protection and, sadly, people have died inside the gap it created. There is no version of this where we get to do nothing and call that the safe option. Doing nothing has a body count. This bill weighs a person's privacy against a person's life, and it gets the balance right.

Now I want to turn to the families. When I visit the RSLs in my electorate in Essendon, Keilor East, Flemington and Kensington, I don't just meet veterans. I meet their partners holding toddlers on their hips. I meet the parents watching their grown sons and daughters with that particular mixture of pride and fear. I meet the kids. The families of the men and women who serve are what I have come to think of as the silent ranks. They are the first responders inside their own homes. They are the ones who notice the withdrawal first, who hear the flashback in the middle of the night, who carry the weight quietly and ask for nothing. For too long, our national systems have not treated them as though they exist.

I trained as a psychologist. I studied developmental and child psychology. One of the first and most basic things you learn is that you cannot understand a person in isolation from the people around them. Mental health is not something that happens inside one person. It is relational. It is held, or it is dropped, by the people in the room. So when a system pretends that a veteran is a single individual to be processed and ignores the partner, the parents and the children who are holding that person up it isn't just unkind; it's clinically wrong. You will not keep a veteran well if you let the people keeping them well fall over. This bill recognises that. It builds the family into the way information is shared and support is offered so that the silent ranks are finally counted.

The timing of this is important because of what is happening today. On 1 July this year—today—the new Veteran and Family Wellbeing Agency opens its doors. That agency exists because of the same royal commission. It was recommendation 87. This government has put $78 million behind it. From day one it will be a single place a veteran or a family member can go to find help by postcode or by phone and a person will help them navigate instead of handing them just another form. A family member can ring it even if they are not a DVA client themselves. The information-sharing powers in this bill help this agency to do effective work. It's only useful if it knows who you are when you walk through the door. The legislation we debate in here and the service that opens up today are two halves of the same promise—that no-one has to navigate this alone anymore. This is the through-line of this government's whole record on veterans, and it is worth putting plainly.

There's half a billion dollars to clear the backlog of compensation claims, with hundreds of extra staff brought on to actually process them, so that claims are answered in months, not years. The Defence and Veterans' Service Commission was legislated last year and is now operating as an independent watchdog with the teeth to hold the whole system to account. There's a shift across DVA towards early intervention and prevention rather than waiting for the damage to be done and then treating it. And there's $5.7 billion in this year's budget to support the health and wellbeing of veterans and their dependents. This is a system being rebuilt piece by piece around the people it is meant to serve.

I think about Jenny Brown at the Keilor East RSL, who leads her sub-branch with such dedication and deep pride, who I was honoured to stand beside at the dawn service on Anzac Day this year. Jenny and her team don't just run a club; they run a sanctuary. The thing about a sanctuary is that it works because someone is paying attention to the people who walk through the door. Our job in this place is to make the national system pay attention the way Jenny and her team do—to make it notice, to make it reach out first.

Our government isn't pretending that this bill fixes everything, because no bill does, and the families who fought for the royal commission have earned our honesty more than they have earned any slogans. The test of all of this is not the passage of this legislation; it is whether, in five years, a partner in Flemington got the call before the worst happened, or a veteran in Keilor East only had to tell their story once, or a family in Essendon found the agency door open. That is the only measure that counts. But this bill makes that outcome possible in a way it wasn't before.

The men and women of our Defence Force put their hand up to serve our nation, to do hard and dangerous things on our behalf. We ask them to give up the ordinary safety the rest of us take for granted. The very least we owe them in return is a system that supports them, that talks to itself, that sees them coming and that never makes them carry both halves of their own story alone. A handful of volunteers at a small sub-branch in Kensington shouldn't have to do the system's job for it. With this bill, the system finally starts doing its own. I commend the bill to the House.

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