Doorstop Interview — Launceston Veterans’ and Families’ Hub

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
Doorstop Interview
Launceston Veterans’ and Families’ Hub
Thursday, 21 May 2026

MATT KEOGH, MINISTER FOR VETERANS’ AFFAIRS: Wonderful to be here at Launceston RSL for the official opening of the new Veterans’ and Families’ Hub here as part of the Veterans Hub run by RSL Tasmania. There's two hubs, Hobart and Launceston. They've been funded through $5.5 million that came from the Albanese Government to enable not just these hubs but spokes around Tasmania. And it’s part of our Veterans’ and Families’ Hub network across Australia that’s making sure that we have hubs where veterans and families can come to access service and support, either at the hub itself or being referred to the appropriate service provider. This is critical. The Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide recognised that there's so many different services out there to support veterans, which is great, but people don't know where to go. And these hubs are somewhere on the ground veterans can go to get advocacy support, to get other advice and support. RSL has been working closely with other service providers like Legacy and having Open Arms available here as well, so that veterans can get the support that they need, but also that they deserve. And it's great to see the work that RSL Tasmania has done with RSL Launceston here with other organisations, bringing the community together. Lots of volunteer hours and work have gone into also bringing this hub to life to support the veteran community here. Across the northeast of Tasmania there's some 3400 veterans and their families, making sure that they've got access to good support through a hub like this is incredibly important, and the Albanese Government is really proud to be able to support this coming to life with the official opening today. I'm going to let Mike, who's the State President of the RSL, say a bit more about the detail of what they're delivering through their veteran hub model, but it's been wonderful to be here with Jess and Tammy as well, who have been big supporters of this project coming to life, and it's wonderful to see so many people from the community coming together today to make it a reality,

MIKE GALLAGHER, RSL TASMANIA STATE PRESIDENT: For RSL Tasmania, this is a significant achievement. It demonstrates that the $5.5 million that we received in a grant, we've been able to put together our Veteran Hub, our two hubs, one in Hobart and one in Launceston, which was open today, plus our four spokes being in Huonville, at Railton, at Devonport and at Queenstown, so we've got coverage almost right around the State. What does that mean for veterans? It means that veterans can ring in, make appointments, certainly at the hub, come in and deal with professionals in regard to the issues that veterans have. Now, whether that's compensation, whether that's housing, whether it's employment, whether they need a social member, whether they just need to sit and talk with people, we've got professionals in our hubs to be able to support them. So, from RSL Tasmania's viewpoint, whilst this has been running for about seven months now, today officially it becomes a hub. And we've got one spoke to go, that being at Georgetown. We're looking forward to opening that up as well, and we've demonstrated that, yes, if RSL Tasmania receives grant money, we can put it to very, very worthwhile projects. Thank you. I'll ask the CEO to say a few words now, John Hardy.

JOHN HARDY, RSL TASMANIA CEO: Look, today's a good day. So today's a good day. I mean, look, this is the second hub to be opened, two hubs in obviously Tasmania, with four to become five spokes. It will deliver wraparound services in the whole of Tasmania. Wherever you are, it doesn't matter where you are. If you can find us, we can find you, and hopefully you can now find us. You can go online, or you can call the central lines, and you'll go to a navigator. The navigator then triages the work, and then it gets delivered to the right place. This is point delivery, so this is where we get someone in remote area, we get them to a local spoke, or to hub if we can, and we deliver services. Or we do it remote through the normal social media that most younger veterans have now got, so that solves some problems. We currently have 560 people right now in the system receiving help. We've now over 600 walk-ins across the whole state, and there are over 1300 people in the system as we talk. So this is working. It is delivering change. Have we got a way to go? It, of course, we have. Can we do it better? Of course, we can. But we're doing it all right now. This system will improve, it will evolve, and it will continue to learn. This is a good day for Tasmania.

REPORTER: What are services that veterans are using the most?

HARDY: So, the most veterans use is compensation. So, we have compensation advocates. We have two types of compensation advocates. one is full time, so we pay them, and the other ones are volunteers, and it's a bit of a suite of which we can do. Currently, there are about 480 in the system that are doing compensation that would be the highest use. The next use would be social work. So we also have full-time social workers. So from January to the end of March, the social workers put in over 600 hours. That's between two social workers. The social work is very diverse, so it could be anything from employment through sadly to family violence. It's a very diverse package that they work in. Then you'd be moving on to sort of things like wellbeing, and then housing. Housing isn't far behind. So we've helped house in the first three months 12 veterans. Now we're building on that. We're building on the housing with the help of the federal government. That's something that'll take time, but we are also doing a lot with the local State government in regard to try and get people, get people into veteran housing. The issues veterans have is a lot of them have pensioners, so they've got too much money to go into social housing, but not enough money to afford rentals, so we may end up paying their bond, and I think so far this year we're probably at about $6,000 worth of bonds alone. And then we go to the bottom end, where we might be issuing food parcels. And that is the landscape. It's vast and wide. Will we ever meet service? No, we won't. We'll never make that bucket big enough, but we'll continue to develop and improve our service.

REPORTER: What sort of feedback have you received about the hub in Hobart?

HARDY: Look, so it's about - I would say it's about 90 percent good. So that hub has had in excess of 450 walk-ins, so that's one site, and by the way, that's in 10 weeks, so it is working predominantly. It's good feedback. We need to get better on things like our phones and stuff like that, and we need to get better on things like callbacks. Now, these are very low minorities that we're not calling back, but we need to do better in that, and we will continue to improve, so like I said, you know, I'm happy to become comfortable with the service is about 90 percent but we never go for 90 percent, we try and get 100 percent. But that will take time, we're still learning this game, and that's something that we all need to evolve with, and that's just not at state level, it's a national level. How do we integrate a digital system that delivers services across the whole country? That's quite hard, but there's also a lot of legal space there that would need to be closed off, even around simple things like data protection. So, it's an ongoing piece.

REPORTER: And how important is it for veterans' families to be aware of the services that are available here, and to be in the, in that loop?

HARDY: Yeah, look, so I think whenever we talk about veteran pubs, and particularly we call this a veteran hub, people do forget about the families we service families as well. Look, and I'm going to give you a quick statistic, 75 percent of the service we deliver is delivered to non-members of the RSL, so if you can find another organization that delivers 75 percent of its impact to non-members, please tell me who they are. It doesn't matter to us whether you're a veteran, whether you're a family member, in a lot of cases whether you're even a father or mother of that veteran, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if we've got a move. An elder lady, for instance, that's aged and wants to move back to her family. Her husband was actually the veteran. We still moved him to Western Australia, so we'll do things like that. It doesn't matter if you are in the veteran ecosystem, we will help, or we know someone that can help.

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