Radio interview — ABC Far North Queensland, Cairns, Breakfast with Maria Hatsakis

MARIA HATSAKIS, HOST: As the Navy prepares to celebrate its next recruits at a graduation ceremony at HMAS Cairns today, there are questions being asked about our own duty of care to those who have already served their country, a decision to cap allied health treatment to $5,000 has been met with some pretty sharp criticism in veteran circles, but there are many other issues as well as evidenced by the 3,000 or so pages that were written by the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide. It's been a couple of years since that report was handed down, and as we know, our veterans serve; they don't ask for anything in return, and yet that is the promise that we give back in their time of need. The Minister for Veterans' Affairs and Defence Personnel is Matt Keogh, and he's your guest on ABC Far North. Thank you so much for dropping by, Minister.

MATT KEOGH, MINISTER FOR VETERANS' AFFAIRS AND DEFENCE PERSONNEL: Great to be here, thanks for having me.

HATSAKIS: I guess, Minister, today is one of the days that you look forward to, it's one of the more pleasurable parts of the job, I can only imagine, welcoming the next recruits, as you'll be doing at HMAS Cairns today with the graduation of the Navy Indigenous Development Program graduates.

KEOGH: Very much looking forward to it. It's the first time I've had the opportunity to come to the graduation from this program, and it's a great example of Defence really leaning in and engaging with our First Nations community and making sure that they're best prepared t commence a career in the Defence Force, but also for them to be able to take what they've learnt back to community as well, and especially across the North of Australia, whether it's up here in Far North Queensland, across the Top End of the Territory or in Western Australia.  The Defence Force is really strongly engaged with our First Nations communities, and we want to make sure that our Defence Force also reflects that diversity in our community as well. So this is a wonderful program, really looking forward to the graduation later today.

HATSAKIS: I know that there is a proud history of indigenous involvement in the Defence services in Northern Australia through our own 51st Battalion, through the reserves across parts of Cape York Peninsula, the Torres Strait. How are we doing in terms of making that pathway into a formal role within the ADF a more attractive proposition for Indigenous people? How are the figures showing? Are we making inroads?

KEOGH: Well certainly all of the things that make Defence service attractive to the general population are certainly of benefit and attraction to our First Nations communities as well. And what I think is really great is that the proportion of our First Nations members in our Defence Force is greater than they are as a proportion of the overall population. So we're actually doing a great job of engagement, and the reserve forces in particular, like, you know, 51st and others, like NORFORCE and Pilbara Regiment, really demonstrate that they operate at a high tempo in terms of the work that they do in terms of patrolling the North of Australia and providing that surveillance capability that we need. And so they really do important work for our Defence Force and the defence of our country, and we're seeing great engagement both in terms of First Nations community joining the Defence Force but also the way in which Defence can engage back into those communities as well.

HATSAKIS: So what percentage of our Naval forces, for example, are Indigenous?

KEOGH: I don't have a breakdown by service.

HATSAKIS: Okay, fair enough, sorry, I haven't briefed that I was going to ask you …

KEOGH: No, that's okay, but what    

HATSAKIS: It just occurred to me that that would be an interesting benchmark. I mean, what are some of the barriers that the Naval Indigenous Development Program are trying to overcome then?

KEOGH: So as you would appreciate, a lot of people end up leaving school a bit earlier with some of our Aboriginal communities, and so they're not meeting that Year 12 attainment level that we need in order to join our Defence Force, and so this is, if you like, a program that allows those people that are interested in a career in Defence to be able to come up to that level, so that they're then in a position to be able to join the Defence Force. So it's really bridging that gap, if you like, that can develop there, but also service in the Defence Force can be very different to life in community, and so being able to make that cultural adjustment, if you like, to ways of living and styles that the Defence Force present is important as well, and so that's another part of the course that we provide.

HATSAKIS: You're hearing from the Minister for Veterans' Affairs and Defence Personnel, Matt Keogh, in the Far North, attending that graduation at HMAS Cairns today, also meeting with veterans and many other representatives in our community. If you are a veteran and you've got a question for the Minister, here's your chance: 1300 801 222. I feel like the government is facing a real litmus test on its commitment to veterans simply because we have had the Royal Commission, it showed systemic failures, harmful cultural practices and the tragically high rates of suicide and post traumatic stress disorder within the ADF. How are you going at addressing the, what was it, 120 or so recommendations made by the Royal Commission?

KEOGH: So there was 122 recommendations that the Royal Commission made, and that was September 2024, and we provided the Government's response to those recommendations in December of 2024. Importantly, we took action very quickly on what the Royal Commission itself said was its most important recommendation, and that was to create a new statutory oversight body that would oversee Defence and DVA in the implementation of the Royal Commission's recommendations, 'cause there had been many past inquiries, many past recommendations that the Royal Commission had seen had gone by the wayside.  We were able to legislate that by February 2025, and that was up and running by September of 2025. By the end of 2025, we'd implemented 32 of the recommendations, and we're on track at the moment to have implemented two thirds of the recommendations by the end of this year, so we're really trying to move at pace, because we recognise the seriousness and importance of getting these recommendations implemented. And then if we look at the interim report, which was a bit earlier, there was 13 recommendations there, we took action in relation to all of those, but one of the most important and significant was the call to harmonise and simplify the legislation that underpinned the veterans' support system, because there was three different pieces of legislation, three different schemes that covered different veterans from different times and different types of service. Some veterans were covered by two, or indeed all three pieces of legislation, which made it very unwieldy and complex. The Royal Commission said this was contributing to suicidality in the veteran community. So we took that on and undertaken a huge consultation process over the last few years and legislated to have a single scheme moving forward from 1 July this year. So it will be simpler and easier for veterans and families to know what they're entitled to, what support is there under the legislation, easier for advocates to support them because we're only having to worry about one scheme, and importantly, it will be quicker for DVA to actually process those claims, because again they're only having to worry about one scheme. The scheme   the claims that are the hardest and longest for DVA to process are the ones where a veteran is covered by more than one scheme, and sometimes they have to process and then come back and look at the other scheme as well. So removing that complexity will make a big positive difference for the veteran community.

HATSAKIS: Which is really important, because as the Royal Commission found, it was the delay and the protracted nature of trying to not only put forward your applications but then the appeals process if the decision doesn't go your way. I mean, is that getting more streamlined, even irrespective of what you're saying is coming in from July 1? What's happening on that front    

KEOGH: So we've streamlined the appeal process …

HATSAKIS: to make sure that the outcomes of getting there, yeah?  

KEOGH: … yeah, we've streamlined the appeals process so that all appeals go to the Veterans' Review Board which is a specialist veteran friendly review process, but also we've significantly increased the resources within DVA. It's now the best resourced it's been in three decades, and that's been important because claims were not even being looked at when we came into Government. There was some 42,000 in a backlog the Royal Commission identified that hadn't been looked at. Now when someone makes a claim with DVA, it's picked up and looked at within 14 days. The officers then assessing   you know, it's all the information that we need in order to make a decision on this claim here, if not, going back to the veteran or the advocate to make sure we get that information, and claims being lodged now are being determined in around three to four months. That's much better than the year or more that it was taking previously. Now some claims are more complex, they do require more work, and they take longer, and we're, you know, throwing everything at trying to make sure we get through them as quickly as possible, and of course there's some historic claims that have been sitting there we're working through. But for new claims coming in, we are moving through them much more quickly, which is about making sure veterans are getting the support that they need.

HATSAKIS: So Matt Keogh, as the Federal Veterans' Affairs Minister, are you giving with one hand and taking with the other, because there has been some criticism of this decision revealed in the Budget to cap allied health treatment to $5,000. Why would you do that?

KEOGH: So, yeah, there has been a bit of a misunderstanding about what we're doing here. But to be really clear, what we saw, and was something the Royal Commission asked Government to deal with, was that the amount that DVA pays to an allied health professional providing services to a veteran is too low. And it meant that allied health professionals were not servicing veterans; they were saying, "Well, we don't want to support a veteran because you don't pay us enough". So what we've done and announced in the Budget, and to be very clear, this doesn't kick in until 1 July 2027, so more than a year away, is that we're going to increase the fees that are being paid to allied health professionals supporting our veterans, so better access to allied health in that way. The other thing is that the previous Government had in place what's called the treatment cycle. It meant that veterans accessing allied health had to be back to a GP for a new referral every 12 sessions, so that was adding burden on the veteran, it was adding burden on GPs, veterans have been reporting to us for a long time that they hate it. So we need to have another method of making sure that there is proper integrity and control over the system. We looked at, well, how much allied health services do veterans use? On average it's about $1,900 a year. So we've set a limit at $5,000 at which point then a veteran needs to go back to DVA to say, "I need further approval to access more services". Now we're going to be working over the course of the next year with the veteran community and the allied health professionals to make sure we've got a good system so that there's no gap in service delivery. Obviously, we don't want anything that results in a veteran not being able to access a service they need.

HATSAKIS: So it's not a budgetary measure as such?

KEOGH: So this is all   it's a different way of making sure that we've got a good integrity around a system that supports veterans, because what we've seen here is some veterans being taken advantage of by some service providers. We've seen some veterans though also who are receiving a lot of service, and it's probably providing them benefit, but they should have had a much better outcome by now, or after having received that many treatments. And so it provides us a mechanism to look at maybe something else needs to happen here to better support this veteran. What they're getting right now and just going back on a regular basis for that particular allied health professional isn't delivering the outcomes we would expect, and frankly, that veteran should be expecting better support to help them. So it's about making sure there's a check in there to get a better overall outcome for the veteran as well. There are going to be some veterans, of course, that have very complex needs, so they need to see multiple different allied health professionals; they may well be going over the cap for very understandable reasons; we'll have a method to get that approved. We don't want to see veterans not getting something that they need. This isn't about blocking   where a veteran has a genuine clinical need; we want to make sure they get that. We also want to make sure that veterans are getting the treatment that produces the right result for the veteran. We want a better overall well-being outcome for the veteran, and we also need to get rid of where some veterans are being taken advantage of by unscrupulous providers as well.

HATSAKIS: Matt Keogh, that is exactly why we appreciate the opportunity to speak with you, so we do get a little bit more of the detail behind the headlines, and no doubt those conversations will continue. Before I let you go, because I know you do have a graduation ceremony to get to today and many people to meet with, but FNQ Legacy House.

KEOGH: Yes.

HATSAKIS: We're very proud of the community momentum that has gathered around this, the Cairns Regional Council has come up with the land and the State Government have come up with 1 million bucks. What are you, as the Veterans’ Affairs Minister, willing to do to make FNQ Legacy House a reality for our community?  

MINISTER KEOGH: So this has been a project I've been tracking for a little while now. Matt Smith and I met with Legacy back in, I think it was early 2025, before the last election, and they sort of set out their plan. They didn't have the land at that stage; they were looking at a different plot, I think, didn't have the State on board. Matt came to me a month or so ago in Canberra to let me know that, yep, some land's been identified now, the state government looks like they're willing to get on board, which is great. While I've been up here yesterday and today, I've met with Legacy, we announced over $83,000 of funding for their Legacy Link Program, which supports our defence families, especially those that are defence families where the defence member's transitioning out of full time service, but as part of that meeting, we also went through what their new plan is around the new proposed site, what the state government's prepared to come on board with. That was a really useful opportunity for me to see how their plans have evolved since I met with them last. I can completely see how they and the broader community would benefit from having a better facility available to support the programs that they're running.

HATSAKIS: Well, any facility. We want a home base for Legacy.

KEOGH: Sure. I mean they've got offices now, but I can see why they want to have a better facility, you know, and part of that they're looking at including housing. I was able to meet with some veterans yesterday that had previously been homeless that we've been able to get housed through our Veteran Acute Housing Program up here, which is wonderful. So I can completely see the benefit. I really look forward to working with them. I don't have an announcement for you here today. Trust me, if we have one, we'll be making it.

HATSAKIS: Come on, Minister.

KEOGH: You know, Matt's been, you know, a great advocate for this program, as you would expect him to be as the local MP, and he's doing a great job, and I'm going to keep working with him and Legacy about what we might be able to do.

HATSAKIS: Matt Keogh, I'm going to take that as a "watch this space" and thank you very much for being with our listeners talking about some really important issues for veterans, getting into some of the detail of the reforms that are coming. And yeah, I hope you enjoy the rest of your time in Far North Queensland.

MINISTER KEOGH: Thank you very much for having me.

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