MOTIONS

Mr KEOGH (Burt—Minister for Veterans' Affairs and Minister for Defence Personnel) (12:24): When the parliament discusses the government's enhancements to allied health for veterans, it's important that we speak about it in terms of the policy actually proposed by the government. The government announced, as part of the budget this year, that, from the middle of next year, we will see an increase in funding being provided to allied health professionals by DVA, paying them more to make sure that they can continue to service our veteran community.

As part of those changes, we will also remove something that was causing veterans and medical professionals great burden in the 12-session treatment cycle. By removing that, we will be replacing it with a $5,000 threshold—a threshold that will only apply to one in 10 veterans and that will make sure there is still oversight and review of the use of allied health, so we can make sure veterans get the best health outcomes and the best overall wellbeing outcomes from the services they are provided, to support their health through allied health services.

This is about enhancing the overall wellbeing of our veteran community, removing a burden on our veteran community and making sure that service providers are there and available. The Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide—a royal commission that was resisted by the opposition when they were in government—recommended that fees be increased. That's something that this measure seeks to do.

In the four years I've been the minister, we have seen both veterans and allied health service providers approach government saying that they are not remunerated enough and that, in their view, that would see them stop servicing our veteran community. That would be a travesty. The member for Riverina mentioned before the difficulty in regional Australia in accessing medical services.

Well, if we don't increase those fees, that is going to continue to be a problem. That's why we've been enhancing the amount paid to GPs to make sure that they service our veterans, and we've proposed to increase allied health fees to make sure that they continue to service the veteran community as well. When we look at the budget and what we have delivered as a government, we inherited, when we came to government, a shocking state of affairs when it came to supporting our veteran community.

Under our government, the Department of Veterans' Affairs is now the best resourced it has been in three decades. That increase in resourcing has meant we have been able to process the backlog of claims we inherited from the previous government. It was fundamentally important that we were able to do that—so important that the royal commission recommended in its interim report that we do it; it did not even wait until its final report.

In addition to that, in supporting our veteran community, we have provided an additional $15.9 billion in service provision since we came to government—services that the veteran community needed, that they deserved but that were not being delivered to them, because the previous government would not process their claims and would not make sure they had access to that health care and support.

That means that, under our government, we are expending around $15 billion this year in service and support to our veteran community. That's 50 per cent more than in the final year of the Morrison government—an additional $5 billion. This year alone, we estimated an increase of some $800 million in support to our veteran community.

Whilst the opposition might like to throw around particular numbers in the budget, they are missing the overall support and service. What's fundamentally important is this: in the proposed changes we have outlined, we have been very clear, firstly, that we will work together with the veteran community and with allied health professionals to make sure we have a system that works seamlessly to support our veteran community, and that, in removing the additional administrative burden that was there from the treatment cycle, we will also make sure that anyone who needs additional allied health services and has a clinical need will be able to get them.

We have made sure we have also recognised that those veterans with the most complex circumstances—those that are TPI or eligible for the SRDP, or those that have been designated as catastrophically injured—are exempt from this process, recognising their higher needs, making sure they are supported. We are also being very clear that anyone who needs additional support and is seeking a review at that $5,000 threshold from DVA will not lose access to allied health services while that review is being undertaken, making sure that there's continuity of service delivery when we're supporting our veterans.

This can't just be looked at as a single measure on its own. We have been doing work across the board when it comes to supporting our veteran community in so many different ways. The royal commission is a seminal work.

It talks about the great tragedy that has affected our veterans—the fact that you can have a situation where defence personnel and veteran community rates of suicide were much higher than we saw across the Australian community. It's why a royal commission was so desperately important, and it's why we took its recommendations so seriously, including the recommendation around increasing fees.

But it's not just been that. By the end of last year, we had already implemented 25 per cent of the royal commission's recommendations. We moved swiftly to establish the Defence and Veterans' Service Commission, which provides that oversight of government implementation of those recommendations.

That is a unique body. You've never before seen a government set up a whole separate statutory body just to oversee the implementation of royal commission recommendations. That's how seriously the Albanese government took these issues.

We're still on track to have implemented two-thirds of those recommendations by the end of this year, which included setting up the Veteran and Family Wellbeing Agency, which started in the middle of this year. We've just started the inquiry into military sexual violence, something that the royal commission also called for. There is work happening across the board, whether it's in defence policy or legislative changes, whether it's in supporting DVA with extra funding and resources or whether it's in processing claims or enhancing access to medical care.

We've done work to enhance access to treatments and support, both for veterans and for serving personnel, so that we can actually deliver those improved overall wellbeing outcomes across our serving community, our veteran community and their family members as well. These are all things that we should be working together across the parliament to deliver. But, unfortunately, we have seen some rhetoric around particular elements and particular areas being mischaracterised without recognising the important work that we have done with the veteran community.

We committed to working with the veteran community when we outlined these changes in the budget to make sure that we got the service delivery elements right, to make sure we had seamless provision of allied health services and were able to maintain those allied health services by increasing the fees being paid to those providers, all of which is critically important.

But the mischaracterisation of the threshold—remembering there's already a review right now, and that happens every 12 sessions. We are moving that up to the $5,000 threshold, which reduces the burden on our veteran community. It reduces the burden on the practitioners so that there's more access and availability to those practitioners.

These are all things that have been welcomed by those groups. These are all incredibly important things. But, just in the context of this debate, I think it's also important for everybody in the discussion in this House, in the Senate and in the media to just take a moment while we discuss policy properly—and we should debate policy; that's what this parliament is here to do—to take guidance from Mindframe in their guidance to parliamentarians when discussing suicide and self-harm.

They say: Parliamentarians have a unique responsibility when speaking publicly about suicide and self-harm, including in parliamentary proceedings, when talking to media and in community settings. … … … Research clearly tells us that public discussion, if not carefully framed, can increase distress, reinforce stigma or contribute to further suicidal behaviour in the community.

They also say that you should ensure your language does not sensationalise suicide or suggest that there is nothing that can be done and that care and restraint should be exercised so discussion does not inadvertently amplify risk. I urge everybody, in the discussion of the issues that we are debating today and that we have been considering with government and that I have been engaging on in roundtables and other consultations with the ex-service community and with practitioners, to keep those things in mind while we properly discuss how we can collectively work together to ensure that we have the best outcome to support our veteran community.

In that regard, I also remind those opposite and in this parliament we currently have two bills in the Senate that are also about implementing recommendations from the royal commission. Between those two bills, they will implement 20 of the recommendations of the royal commission and support the implementation of a further 20 of the recommendations of the royal commission, and it would be helpful, I think, to the entire veteran community, our serving personnel and our families if we could all work constructively together to deliver these better outcomes to support personnel, veterans and family members.