Radio interview - ABC Brisbane Breakfast with Craig Zonca and Loretta Ryan

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC BRISBANE BREAKFAST WITH CRAIG ZONCA AND LORETTA RYAN
TUESDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER 2025

SUBJECTS: Veterans' mental health inpatient and outpatient support, Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide.

HOST, LORETTA RYAN: It was the closure few saw coming but so many had been facing ever since. In June the Toowong Private Hospital abruptly shut its doors and it left vulnerable people in need. 

HOST, CRAIG ZONCA: At the time the Queensland Health Minister Tim Nicholls was at to point out. Well, take a listen.

QUEENSLAND HEALTH MINISTER, TIM NICHOLLS: The patients at Toowong Private tend to be the less acute, the lower acuity patients there. Often many of them are there for day patients 

CRAIG ZONCA: Except as you have heard here on 612ABC Brisbane breakfast. They aren't the less acute, they are the heroes who step up when we call. But who's stepping up for them? Since then we've also marked the first anniversary of the delivery of findings into the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide. That report laid bare the failures, the flaws and the fatal consequences of what is a broken system and included an extensive list of recommendations critical for change. 

RYAN: Yeah. The Federal Government accepted 104 of them, noted 17 more for further work and to date nine have been ticked off. So, it leaves 110 more to be worked on. 

ZONCA: The man tasked with making those happen is Matt Keogh, the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs and Defence Personnel. Matt Keogh, good morning to you. 

MINISTER FOR VETERANS' AFFAIRS AND DEFENCE PERSONNEL, MATT KEOGH: Good morning. Great to be with you. 

ZONCA: Firstly in Brisbane for the day. What's on the agenda. 

KEOGH. So, I'm heading out to Ipswich after this, meeting with Legacy and also visiting another service provider for our veteran community and then meeting with veteran families this afternoon as part of our National Veteran Families Forum that we hold. So, a good day of engaging with the veteran community and looking at how we can continue to improve services and support. 

RYAN: Yeah, well that's a key and this is the first time we've been able to speak to you so let's go back a little bit I spoke about Toowong. Was your Department caught out by its closure? 

KEOGH: Certainly, we didn't have any advance notice of what that private provider was doing. But as this occurs occasionally, this isn't the first private hospital closure we've had to deal with and DVA works very quickly to make sure that veterans that are either inpatients or outpatients of hospitals like Toowong are referred onto other providers, other hospitals, so that they can maintain continuity of care and that's what happened with those veterans that were accessing Toowong, and there was some real specialised service there and specialist who was operating there, and they've been able to themselves relocate now to another hospital as well, and that's really great. So, we can look at how we can engage with them going forward as they set that up. But, you know, this is always difficult when it happens. It's outside our control. We don't operate the hospitals, but we do make sure that when we're notified that there's going to be a closure, that we work with those veterans that are accessing those services, whether they're inpatient or outpatient, to get them referred into other appropriate services and hospitals. 

RYAN: You have to look at the programmes that are available, because we know at least one facility that offered itself up as an alternative, but it didn't have a veterans programme in place, so that can't be acceptable. 

KEOGH: Well, I'm not going to get into where individual veterans were placed because it's a small number and it'll affect privacy if I go into which hospitals they went to and why. But we've got already in Queensland and Brisbane in particular, we've got, I think, a handful of different hospitals that were already existing DVA service providers. So, we're able to work with positioning people into those different hospitals. 

RYAN: Are you satisfied, though, that they are getting the treatment they need now and will do in the future? Is there enough? 

KEOGH: We're actually pretty well serviced across Australia, especially in capital cities, for hospitals that provide these sorts of services. And they are different for each veteran and each hospital and how they operate. There are some. There was an operator, for example, at Toowong that had a particularly specialist service and that was really helpful for some of those veterans there. And with the closure of Toowong, that person had to relocate their practice and how they were operating to another provider and they've had to re set up. And obviously there was a gap there. But in terms of making sure that veterans were getting the support that they need immediately, we were able to do that through the other providers that are already contracted to DVA. 

RYAN: Yeah. Well, the course is widely considered the gold star of PTSD treatment and we know it is relocated at New Farm. But is that something you are supporting and advocating for? 

KEOGH: Supporting and advocating for what? 

RYAN: For that gold star treatment of PTSD? Because we know that is the real problem. 

KEOGH: Sure. And look, there's actually across the country, there's a number of really good PTSD treatment providers. And so I don't want to single out any particular provider as being a gold standard provider because we've got to meet the needs of veterans where they're at with different needs depending on their own circumstances. But that provider, you know, very good provider. I've met with them in different contexts as well and it's great that they're now being able to reset up so that they'll become available for veterans to access going forward. 

ZONCA: Let's hope so. Matt Keogh is with you, the Veterans' Affairs Minister. I want to turn to the Royal Commission findings and where those recommendations are up to late last month, this was Ian Lindgren from the Australian Peacekeeper and Peacemaker Veterans association addressing the Senate Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Legislation Committee. 

IAN LINDGREN: Since the Royal Commission's final report, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare project that approximately 96 veterans have taken their own lives. And behind each of that number is a destroyed family. In addition to that, there are approximately 135 other Australians affected. That brings it to a total of 12,960 Australians now living with losses since September last year. Veteran suicide rates are not just continuing, they are accelerating. 

ZONCA: And that's Ian Lindgren. And here's Brendan Cox, the boss of Legacy here in Brisbane, speaking to us here on 612. Just a couple of weeks ago. 

BRENDAN COX: The Royal Commission final findings made 122 recommendations. They were adopted by the Government in December last year. The Government of the Day today was the Government of the day for the whole Royal Commission. So, there's no further in briefings to Ministers. There's no reason for any delay on any one of recommendations. And yet we are still seeing three suicides per fortnight in the veteran and defence community. So, the Government, by taking inaction, is saying that those lives aren't important to them. Well, they are. And every life that is lost is 122 people impacted. 

ZONCA: That's Brendan Cox from Legacy. Minister, you're responsible. This is your portfolio. I want to just run those numbers as we extrapolate that out in eight weeks from today- 

KEOGH: Well before you do that, because those numbers aren't correct. 

ZONCA: Aren't they? 

KEOGH: No. 

ZONCA: Ok, well, you can. 

KEOGH: Yeah. So, firstly, as was mentioned by Brendan, every life matters. So, I don't want in any way to minimise the loss and grief for any loss of life here, but the statistics that were released just the other week from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare show that between 1997 and 2023, there was 1,840 defence and veteran related suicides. And what it showed is for the three… from 2021, 22 and 23, in each of those years we've seen declining numbers of suicides in the defence community and veteran community. That's encouraging. It's still too high. And certainly the numbers that are very preliminary numbers, but that we are aware of for the year since the Royal Commission handed down its report, are far less than the numbers that Mr. Lindgren was citing. 

ZONCA: OK, so your audience here in Brisbane, veterans and serving personnel at Gallipoli Barracks at Enoggera, RAAF Base Amberley, HMAS Morton. Why is the action so slow in coming on these recommendations? 

KEOGH. So, I think the thing to be clear about actually is that we've actually been doing a hell of a lot. The Royal Commission handed down its report in September of last year. We provided the Government's response in December. That is world record. There is no quicker government response to a Royal Commission. And we've been taking action straight away on that. We set up a Taskforce immediately in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. We did it there so, it was independent of Defence and independent of DVA to provide advice to Government on how we sequence these recommendations being implemented and also to provide advice on those 17 recommendations that were noted for further work. And they've been doing that and providing that advice to us. We're working through the implementation of those. And as was mentioned before, there's 110 of those recommendations are in progress now. We have already implemented nine. The first of which was to legislate the establishment of an oversight body. This was in fulfillment of recommendation 122, which the Royal Commission itself was its most important recommendation, it said. And so we've legislated that in February. So, only a few months after the Royal Commission's report that will be up and running in just a few weeks, where in the process we've got an Interim Commissioner and we're in the process of advertising at the moment to do the full merit based selection of that role. I anticipate that we will have a much larger number of these recommendations implemented by the end of this year. So, you know, at the 12 months of when the Government provided an actual response to the Royal Commission. I would like so many of these recommendations to have been implemented yesterday. Frankly, I think we all would 

ZONCA: Because these recommendations – 

KEOGH: Because they're really important. 

ZONCA: They will be life changing. 

KEOGH: They will be life changing and they'll be system changing and they'll have long going impact and that's why we're working hard on them. But some of them do… a big chunk of them rely on other ones being implemented first, getting that sequencing right. A number of them require either legislative changes or regulatory changes to underpin the work that needs to happen to implement those recommendations. So, nine have been implemented and they're mainly internal policy changes within Defence to implement things that are required as well as the work that we're doing to set up the new wellbeing agency. So, we've been undertaking the co-design and consultation work the Royal Commission said we had to do. We've been doing that and we're bedding down the outcomes of that with a view to having that new wellbeing agency up and running next year. We're also doing the work on developing terms of reference for the sexual misconduct inquiry which will occur next year. The prevalence, the sexual misconduct prevalence review work has started. So, there's a lot of things… I completely understand when you look at and go there's 122 recommendations but only nine are done. 

RYAN: But will those nine save lives? 

KEOGH: Those nine will certainly have a very positive impact for people getting those policy changes right and having the oversight body set up, which is important not just in terms of oversighting government implementation of the 122 recommendations, but also being able to provide advice to Government and Governments on an ongoing basis into the future where further changes are needed or where we need to make further refinement. 

RYAN: What can you promise families of Defence Force personnel who are in serving now? What can you promise them for their future when they come out? 

KEOGH: So, the thing that we've been really clear about is making sure that whilst they're serving in the Defence Force that they are being treated well and they are well supported and they're well supported in service as well as when they transition out and that support and transition out and when they leave service, if they need additional support, is that available to them? When we came into Government three years ago, we had a situation where there was 42,000 claims in DVA that weren't even being looked at by anybody. We've increased the resourcing in DVA. We've made sure that those claims have been processed through the system that's really important so that people can get access to the healthcare, the supports being able to access PTSD programmes that they weren't able to access because they were waiting for someone to just look at their claim. Claims lodged now are looked at by someone in 14 days and then on average they're processed in about 100, 110 days. Now, I still want that time to be shorter, but it's about a third of what it was. So, we are trying to make sure that people know that they're valued, that they're well supported. Part of that, and we released this the other week, is the new Defence and Veteran Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy, which is based on the recommendations we've got from the Royal Commission and consultation across the sector, and really understands that you can't have a defence strategy for mental health and wellbeing and a veteran strategy for mental health and wellbeing as if they're separate things. Obviously, people's service life impacts their life as a veteran. It's a continuum and making sure we approach it holistically is really important. 

ZONCA: Matt Keogh, the Minister for Veterans Affairs. One expert in PTSD has told us that we're very good at turning boys and girls into warriors, but not very good at turning warriors back into humans. Can you make that your promise, that that is what you want to see as your legacy as Minister? 

KEOGH: I think certainly that observation in terms of the adjustment from military life back into civilian life is, for some people, proves to be really difficult. The Chair of the Royal Commission was also really clear when he said that the vast majority of people in the Defence Force have a great time in the Defence Force and they go on to live very successful lives after their time in the Defence Force. But for some, they don't. And that transition point, that moving from full time military service into a predominantly civilian life is a real time of risk for some people making that adjustment. Especially where, and we see this a lot, people, when they leave the Defence Force, aren't going back to, say, the community that they left, where they grew up, where they've got family connection, they might be moving to a completely different community and having to create whole new connections and making sure that not just that services are available, but connection is available, is really important. Things like our Veterans and Families Hubs are a really important part of how we deliver that as well. 

RYAN: But we have failed, obviously. 

KEOGH: Clearly we failed. That's why we called for a Royal Commission in the first place. I was very clear about this in my first statement to the House not long after becoming Minister, where I apologised on behalf of successive Governments, not any one particular Government, but that we'd failed. There was a clear lack of provision of service and support in how we were supporting people in service and when they'd left. That's why the Royal Commission was so important. 

RYAN: But now we have to move more quickly on the recommendations. 

KEOGH: Absolutely, and that's what we're doing. 

ZONCA: Matt Keogh, I really appreciate your time this morning. 

KEOGH: Great to be with you. Thank you. 

ZONCA: The Minister for Veterans’ Affairs and Defence Personnel joining you here on 612 ABC Brisbane. 

ENDS

Open Arms – Veterans & Families Counselling provides 24/7 free confidential crisis support for current and ex-serving ADF personnel and their families on 1800 011 046 or the Open Arms website. Safe Zone Support provides anonymous counselling on 1800 142 072. Defence All-Hours Support Line provides support for ADF personnel on 1800 628 036 or the Defence Health Portal. Defence Member and Family Helpline provides support for Defence families on 1800 624 608