David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to say thank God—to thank the deity of your choice—that the government has finally worked out that the Defence Amendment (Defence Honours and Awards Appeals Tribunal) Bill 2025 was a bill with zero friends. Let's think about the history of this bill. A bunch of Defence brass, all sitting there, polishing their shoulders, are kind of a bit pissed that members of the veterans community and serving members of the ADF actually have an independent pathway to challenge their decisions. The Defence hierarchy loathes the very idea that its decisions can have any independent oversight or any independent scrutiny anywhere. This Defence honours tribunal has been sitting there for over a decade, overturning decisions of the Defence hierarchy, and has been a place that veterans, their families and the community can go to challenge bad decisions by Defence. It happens with some procedural fairness. They follow the evidence, and time after time bad decisions by the Defence leadership have been overturned by the tribunal because they've listened to the evidence and they've seen credible arguments put. The gold brass in Defence are getting more and more agitated that there's this one place of independence in the system. So what do they do? They somehow manage to persuade the department that the tribunal should be gutted and that its independence should be stripped. They then bring in this legislation through the minister's office to just quietly try to slip through a bill to tear away the independence of the tribunal, the one place that the Defence hierarchy can actually be held to account in the multibillion-dollar scandal that is the Australian defence department and the ADF. And then, to the Labor Party's eternal shame, they do what they always do when Defence come in and ask for less scrutiny, more power and more cash. They just rubberstamped it without even thinking. To their eternal shame, every single Labor MP in the lower house voted through this bill to strip away veterans' entitlements and their ability to challenge bad decisions of the ADF. And the reason the Labor Party just rolled in to vote for it is because that's just what they do. Every time Defence asks for something, they just rubberstamp it without even turning their brains on.

Well, thank goodness we've got a veterans community that's pretty engaged at the moment. They turned their brains on, they looked at this bill, and they said. 'It's a stinker.' They said this to the government straight away, and it turns out that this is hardly a surprise. The government didn't even talk to the veterans community before they introduced this bill. They pretended it was supported by the tribunal, and then, when we finally heard from the tribunal, the tribunal said they think the bill stinks, too. It totally stinks.

It takes away the rights of families to bring applications to the tribunal to honour and respect their family members who served. It puts in an arbitrary 20-year time limit on which you can bring applications to the tribunal. It puts in an arbitrary six-month time limit in which you can challenge bad decisions by Defence. Guess who they talked to before they brought this bill in? A bunch of largely blokes with brass on their shoulders who thought emoving any independent challenge to their decisions was a great idea. They got their legislation. They got it through the Labor Party, and the Labor Party put their rubber stamp on it. The majority of members in the lower house from the Labor Party put their rubber stamp on it.

Then it comes here. And what's remarkable about this is that it's one of the first times the Senate has said no to another power grab from Defence leadership. I want to give credit to every member of the Senate who is outside of the Labor Party who actually said, 'No; for once we're going to draw a line in the sand and not just give Defence leadership whatever they want every time they ask, no questions asked, dudding the veterans community in the process.' It's a sign of at least some mild resistance to the endless power grab and the arrogance of Defence leadership, who they can just get whatever they want with no critical analysis applied.

What did we hear from the veterans community? Shannon Hennessy, the chief executive officer of the Veteran, Emergency Services and Police Industry Institute of Australia—which is much more often and more neatly called VESPIIA—made clear this at the public hearing that I participated in:

Honours are an emotional thing; I think we can all agree on that. When we start to put that pressure of timelines—what if we do find grandpa's secret box of documents in the cupboard 20 years from now, that time limit's run out and we can't recognise the work that was done? How devastating is that going to be for the family, that they finally found it and now it's gone? We would certainly argue against those time limits.

How on earth was the government bringing a piece of legislation to try and make that happen? The only answer is uncritical rubberstamping of yet another power grab from Defence leadership. Did they not think this through? Well, clearly they didn't.

VESPIIA also said that putting restrictions on who can appeal the decision—preventing grandkids, cousins and historians from being able to bring an application to the tribunal to recognise service—was an incredibly bad decision with far-reaching negative implication. As VESPIIA wrote in their submission:

This approach locks out important contributors. Many historic recognition cases have been uncovered by historians, extended relatives, or advocates, particularly where no immediate family survives. Restricting eligibility risks silencing valid claims and entrenching inequity.

But Defence leadership wanted it, you see? Defence leadership didn't want this ragtag bunch of people who could actually challenge their decisions in an open hearing before a fair minded tribunal. What they loathed most of all was that the tribunal was independent and could second-guess the bad decisions of Defence, and anything they could do to narrow that independence was what they were willing to do. To Labor's eternal shame, again they rubberstamp another power grab from Defence leadership.

Of course, this was the first major piece of new legislation about veterans brought into this parliament. We had a royal commission into veteran suicides, and what we heard—and it's woven through every recommendation in the royal commission—was that veterans need to be heard. They need to be seen, and they need to be respected. You shouldn't do anything about them without them. Talk to them. Listen to their concerns. Develop policy once you speak to veterans. That's really at the core of the royal commission recommendations. But as Ian Lindgren, the immediate past chair and advisor to the board of the Australian Peacekeeper and Peacemaker Veterans' Association, said at the hearing:

If we look at the recommendations from the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, some of the key personnel related issues were that we were to stop taking anything but a trauma informed practice to veterans. And yet, if we look at this bill and at the previous bill, which I mentioned a few moments ago, these things have just turned up.

They've turned up and surprised, traumatised, upset and agitated the veterans communities, and for what goal? Just to deliver on another power grab for Defence leadership. That's the only purpose of this bill. This is why the Greens said in our dissenting report that the government should withdraw this bill as a statement of good faith with the veterans community.

I'm not going to take a cheap political shot at the minister for doing that. I'm glad the minister has done it. Of course, it was just recognising the political reality that, if the government didn't do it on their own motion today, every single member of the Senate except for the government, as is my understanding, was going to do it for them tomorrow on a co-authored motion from Senator David Pocock, me on behalf of the Greens, and the coalition. So, yes, I'm glad it's been withdrawn today. That at least brings certainty to the veterans community that this power grab will finally not happen, and it brings it forward 24 hours. But let's just be clear about this. The Senate was going to actually, for once, show some genuine independence and knock this thing on the head tomorrow in a peaceful and nonviolent way anyhow. I'm just glad it came forward 24 hours.