Press conference - Ipswich, Queensland

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
PRESS CONFERENCE 
IPSWICH, QUEENSLAND
TUESDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER 2025

SUBJECTS: Veteran Wellbeing Grant Program Funding, the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide

MEMBER FOR BLAIR, SHAYNE NEUMANN: I'm here with Matt Keogh, the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs and Defence Personnel, and a good mate, Donna Reggett, who's been a fantastic supporter of Legacy and involved in it for such a long time - Brittaney, good to see you here as well. Ipswich Legacy do a tremendous amount of good with wellbeing, particularly for young people and widows and so they do a fantastic job here in Ipswich. It's not just about the older generation. It's about young families and people who are dealing with the challenges of suicide and suicidal ideation, and those people who've been lost to war and warfare. So the amount of support they provide to give young people in particular, a chance in life, to give them the opportunity the skills and talent ability that they have locally and in themselves. This is why Legacy operates. It's there to help, and I'm happy to hand over to Matt to talk about the program and to Donna for the great work you do. Thank you very Thanks, Donna.

MINISTER FOR VETERANS’ AFFAIRS AND DEFENCE PERSONNEL, MATT KEOGH: Thank you. Well, thanks Shayne, and I really want to acknowledge and thank you for your great advocacy for the veteran community out here. And it's great to be here with Donna at the Legacy Ipswich and Brittaney. Today, I'm very happy to announce the latest round of recipients for the Veteran Wellbeing Grant Program, which sees nearly $3 million dollars of funding being delivered to 46 organisations around the country, and this grant program supports a whole range of different organisations in providing wellbeing support and assistance to our veteran community and their families in very different and diverse ways, looking at things from a much more well-rounded, holistic approach to wellbeing, something that the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide was very keen to see that we develop, and of course, that's consistent with the work that we're now doing in implementing the recommendation of the Royal Commission to establish, next year, a new Wellbeing Agency to support veterans and families. But the grants today roll out across so many different ways across the country in providing different supports to our veterans and to our families, and here at Legacy, which we're very happy to be providing over $75,000 of funding for programs run on a weekly basis that will support about 100 families here in the Ipswich region, a region that sees over 10,000 veteran families, being able to provide those weekly programs, as well as a three day retreat program as well bringing families together, providing them with support, being able to create connection and be able to link with one another, other people that are having a similar experience, being able to share that experience and being able to learn from and support each other through these programs, incredibly important work that Legacy Ipswich is doing, just as so many organisations across the country are. That's why we're very happy to provide this nearly $3 million worth of funding to 46 organisations nationally. And I'll let, I'll let Donna say a bit about exactly how the program here is going to be working supporting veteran families here in the district region.

DONNA: Thank you. That was the first that I knew how much it was so 75,000 is pretty amazing. Wow, we plan to run some additional education and social experiences for people that are families that are transitioning out of Defence, and also those that have been with lost, lost partners that were serving as well. They'll be run on a weekly basis, so we'll be having socialisation things where people can get together and meet new people that are living a similar experience. The retreats will be a weekend retreat. And the idea of that is to bring people together away from their normal environment, and to take them away to a nice location and let them meet others again in the same situation as they are, to help them build a support network, because once you've transitioned out of Defence, you lose that Defence network. So we're hoping that we can build the supports, give them the education, let them know where the supports are in the system. Talk about mental health, talk about domestic violence, talk about physical health, where they can get exercise physiology, lots of therapeutic programs that are available that often they don't realize are available to themselves and to also to their veterans. So that's our plan, and with the funding that will be able to happen now, and that's brilliant. So thank you so much.

JOURNALIST: Brittaney just tell a bit about your story. What you're hearing - what this means to you today.

BRITTANEY: Okay, I can I just say with the first one about what this program means? Yeah, okay, so this program is going to be amazing for my daughter and I. We're able to connect with other families, other widows and children who are going through similar situation. It's a time for us to reconnect as a, you know, a knit. It's a time for Sadie, my daughter, and I to have a break away from normal life and spend quality time together, as well as with other widows.

JOURNALIST: What can you just tell me about your story? What brought you to legacy?

BRITTANEY: So my story is my husband was in the army. Unfortunately, he… sorry, unfortunately, he passed away in 2020.

DONNA: Brittaney's husband, completed suicide in 2020 during Covid, and Sadie was just five years old at that time, Brittaney was, and still is, our youngest widow of 30. So people often think that they're all 95 years old and have walking frames - well, they don't. As you can see, Brittaney is a beautiful young woman, and these people are also affected. These women are also affected by the suicide of veterans. So Brittany's been with us, and Sadie's been with us through that time, and we've they've been there. They're just like, become a bit like a bit of our family, we've got another few families, sadly, a few families, and a lot of young children in that same age group. So that's Brittaney's story, but sadly, it's everyone's story that we've got here.

JOURNALIST: Thanks. I guess, Minister you know, you hear stories like this all the time. It's been a year, over a year since the Royal Commission recommendations have come out. Obviously, that was for people like Brittaney, that Royal Commission. What, where are the implementation of those recommendations at, at this stage?

KEOGH: So the Royal Commission handed down its final report in September last year, and the government provided its response to those recommendations in December last year. We agreed, or agreed in principle, to 104 of the 122 recommendations, and we referred the other 17 to a special Taskforce, separate to Defence, separate to DVA, to provide advice back to Government on their implementation as well. To date, we have implemented nine of the recommendations, and work is ongoing on 110 of the other recommendations, and we'll have a significant number of those recommendations completed by the end of this year, a year after we provided the Government's response. Most importantly, in February of this year, we legislated the establishment of an oversight body, the Defence and Veterans Service Commission, which implements recommendation 122 of the Royal Commission Report, which the Royal Commission itself said was its most important recommendation. This will oversight the Government's delivery of the response to the Royal Commission's recommendations, but also provide ongoing advice to Government to ensure that we are continuing to improve and refine the way we operate in Defence and provide services and support through DVA, to ensure that we are reducing the rates of suicide and suicidality in our Defence Force and our veteran community. One death is too many. We see through Brittaney's experience the real lasting impact of someone taking their own lives, and we don't want that to occur to anyone. And that's why implementing the recommendations, implementing the Royal Commission's recommendations is so important, it's a task we as a Government are very much committed to delivering as soon as possible.

JOURNALIST: One of those standout recommendations was that Wellbeing Agency you just mentioned before, it won't be up and running until next year. What's taken that so long to get up and running?

KEOGH: So the Royal Commission's recommendation for the establishment of a Wellbeing Agency called on DVA to undertake a co-design process with the Defence, veteran and family community around what that Wellbeing Agency should look like, how it should operate, and in particular, how it should assist Defence personnel in their transition process when they leave Defence into civilian life, making sure that there's no gaps in that process. And so since the Government's response at the end of last year, we have been undertaking that co-design process and consultation process across the Defence, veteran and families community to work up a design for the Wellbeing Agency. And we're working through that feedback, that co-design process now with a view to having the agency up and running next year.

JOURNALIST: What's your message to people like Brittaney, who are still very obviously hurting by what has happened to them and to other, other families in similar situations?

KEOGH: As a Government, we very much understand the pain that these families have and continue to experience, and we want to ensure that families don't have to have that experience going into the future. And it's why we called for the Royal Commission, it's why we've acted promptly in responding to the Royal Commission, and it's why we're working so hard to implement the recommendations from the Royal Commission now so that people in service and veterans after service and their families get the support, the services that they not just that they need, but that they deserve.

JOURNALIST: You mentioned there were still 110 of your recommendations outstanding. What have been the challenges in implementing the Royal Commission and working through them?

KEOGH: So the recommendations that the Royal Commission provided are somewhat interlinked, and so there are some that require others to be implemented before the rest can be implemented. And so we've been working through with the taskforce the sequencing of the implementation of those recommendations, obviously working on those that can be done immediately, most quickly, as well as the ones that are required in order for others to be implemented. Some of those require legislative changes and regulatory changes. We're working through what that legislative changes look like so we can get them into the parliament soon to then enable the rest of the recommendations to be implemented.

JOURNALIST: You're here today for the meeting with Legacy, and then you're heading off to the new Wounded Heroes Ipswich Veteran Center, I guess. Tell me a bit about that and what you're doing there too.

KEOGH: So one of the funding programs that we introduced during the last term of Government was to sit alongside the work that we were doing in developing Veterans’ and Families’ Hubs, which was providing funding to organisations that were providing ongoing support for veterans and families to uplift their capability in doing that work and Wounded Heroes here in Ipswich, which has been providing service across Queensland, indeed, across the country, and they've been expanding that, and we were very happy to be able to provide them with additional funding to expand their service offering here and enable them to expand that service offering more broadly, as part of a $20 million program that we rolled out across the country, uplifting some of these sorts of services so that they can provide Hub like activities and supports to our veteran and family community across the country, and we're very much looking forward, Shayne and I, to going to visit their facility up the road to see what they've been able to do with that funding and how they're improving the support that they're providing, not just to local veterans and families here in the Ipswich region, but also the work that they're now able to perform across Queensland and moving nationally as well.

JOURNALIST: Given obviously this, veterans are still committing suicide, given this is still a massive issue, is enough being done quick enough?

KEOGH: I think this is a space where ideally, you know, I would love everything to have been done yesterday. We wouldn't like in any way to be seeing what we see when it comes to Defence and veteran suicide continuing. We want to make sure these recommendations are implemented as quickly as possible. We received the most recent set of data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare last week, it showed that between 1997 and 2023, some 1,840 Defence veterans that took their own life, one is too many. But encouragingly, we have seen over the last the three years 2021 through to 2023 a reduction in the number of people taking their own lives, that's encouraging, and obviously we want to see that reduce as much as possible by implementing the recommendations of the Royal Commission.

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